Re-writing history, re-inscribing the city: Thailand and delusions of democracy

Abstract

Cities carry traces of their pasts; they also carry traces of imagined pasts, inscribed on them by authoritarian regimes to suppress other imaginings. Bangkok in the early 20th century displayed the signification of a Buddhist royalty and imagined origins, subsequently suppressed with the imposition of new emblems of democracy following a 1932 overthrow of monarchical absolutism. Democracy was to be signified as founded in the common people. In the 21st century, a military junta dressed in the clothes of a pseudo-democracy re-writes the emblems of democracy, now to signify that democracy is not based in the people but, rather, is the gift of a benevolent monarch. The subverting of democracy is to be read from the monuments of the city, which highlight the specific strategies that the authoritarian state invokes in re-writing the national history.