ABSTRACT

Two decades after postcolonialism became a discipline in universities in the West, it entered Thailand in the early 2000s (Nopphorn 2001; Thanes 2004) with some casting doubt over its applicability to the history of Siam/Thailand. On this view, postcolonial thought is not relevant to Thailand, a country that was not officially a Western colony but rather a semi-colony. However, some scholars in political science, International Relations (IR), cultural studies and history welcomed the implications of postcolonial thought because they perceived it as offering alternative reflections on domestic society and beyond. An example is Chairat Charoensin-o-larn who introduces postcolonial thought in order to advance a research methodology based on new inquiries that depart from the state-centric model (Chairat 2001). Chairat also devises an anti-colonial viewpoint to safeguard developing countries against the discourse of modernisation, which, for him, is another Trojan horse of the West (Chairat 2000). However, Chairat as well as other scholars in Thailand tend to focus on reading and disseminating contemporary Western theories to the academic community. Though some of them discuss Western theories at length in their works, they act simply as mediators between Western and Thai knowledge (Pinij 1971; Surak 1981, 2011; Kirathi 2001, 2002, 2012; Teerayuth 2003; Nelson 2005; Chairat 2011, 2012, 2015; Veerayuth 2013). In other words, they are only active in importing Western knowledge. They are less active in initiating their own theoretical proposals. As postcolonial thought becomes more recognised, it merges with other Western theories circulating in the Thai academic community.