Humanities & Foreign Langague Division

The concept of hybridity has been under sustained critical scrutiny for about two decades. Despite this, it has recently appeared in Thai studies in an uncritical fashion as a form of cultural and racial mixing and deployed as part of the conceptual armory to destabilize a putative essentialized version of Thainess found in Thai nationalist discourse. Such attempts deploy the concept for epistemological (post-binary analysis) and ideological ends (anti-official nationalist historiography). One recent example of this is in P. A. Jackson and R. V. Harrison"s eds. The ambiguous allure of the West: Traces of the colonial in Thailand published jointly by Hong Kong and Cornell University Presses. This essay offers some postcolonial reflections of this text, highlighting its continuities with colonial discourse and focusing on its avoidance of and participation in the exercise of racial and colonial power in making a case for contemporary Thainess as a Thai-farang hybrid. In so doing, the paper seeks to rescue the postcolonial concept of hybridity from the depoliticized and dehistoicized framework of "culture contact" implicitly at work in the above volume. It concludes by suggesting that the main strength of a postcolonial concept of hybridity for Thai studies is that it can be used to account for racialized forms of power/knowlwdge in the construction of Thainess and for the subterranean presence and voice of others on the margins of Thai modernity.

This paper draws from cultural studies, postcolonial studies and political economy to track the trafficking in racism and sexism in the cultural economy of contemporary globalization. It approaches this by looking at how global modernity is enacted by Thais and Westerners in Thailand. The author argues that the pursuit of global modernity in Thailand leads Thais to invite and embrace global modernity's racist and sexist core, thereby constituting their self-orientalization. Globalization's racist and sexist economy of desire is shown to be manufactured and retailed by both global and local corporations and to operate in international education, public health, the mass media and public culture. The paper is based on a decade of participant observation and field research.

In Global English and transcultural flows, Alastair Pennycook (2007) tells the story of a British judge, faced with a conflict over legal ownership of an English hip hop song, declared that the lyrics was "utterly beyond his comprehension" (p.2). The example suggests that England can no longer lay claim to complete understanding and mastery over an essential aspect of its culture, the English language. More analytically, it illustrates that a cultural export of England, after a career in the British empire, can flow back into the center in a form that is not only unrecognizable but also disarticulating to traditional English institutions of power and influence.

The TEFL industry is booming in Asia. This explosion has witnessed the rapid dissemination of a variety of teaching materials and pedagogies across the region. While most of this come from global textbook publishers, others come from more personalized sources. One common theme that runs throughout this body of material is the privileged location/ subject position of the white western figure aka "the native speaker." While this figure may appear as voice or body or as a combination of both, its narrative location, authority and effects are always the same, namely to create for itself a point of reference with which comparisons with the 'native other' are invited. This presentation draws from postcolonial theories of narration and identity to locate such operations of power/knowledge in the work of two TELF texts being used in Thailand. It begins by deconstructing this narcissistic form of colonial self-referentiality in TEFL materials before looking at ways in which practicing teachers can engage productively with such texts.