Heterogeneous Thai voices: a contact zone of postcolonial counter-discourse to Anna Leonowens’ orientalist writing of Thailand

Abstract

This study arises out of an interdisciplinary research encompassing two fields of study – English and Education. Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” is employed to provide a framework for working in these two fields and answering the multifaceted research questions. This concept helps me as the researcher to probe issues relating to unbalanced power relations as well as resistance to power – i.e. both in the Orientalist representations of Thailand in Western texts and in English language and literature classrooms in Thai universities. In effect, this yields me insight into the heterogeneous nature of the contact zones of modernised Thailand and Thailand’s English language and literature classrooms. Furthermore, seeing my research as a kind of contact zone allows me to engage in action research that inquires into how English and Education interact with each other, and on the ways that my teacher participants and I, as former students and current teachers of English language and literature, and my student participants experience this interaction. Simultaneously, this action research prompts me as the teacher-researcher to understand how my professional practice has been influenced by the literary theories that I have studied in universities in Thailand and in Australia. I have finally learned that postcolonial theory has shaped my worldview, affected my teaching practice, and been my impulse to conduct this PhD research project. I call this research action research because it is built upon the following political aims. First, this research is aimed at deconstructing the East-West dichotomy and homogeneity of Western power on Thailand, generated by means of Orientalist representations of Thailand in Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court and its subsequent re-writings by other authors. As well, the research is meant to empower Thai students who are normally marginalised in the English classroom by the central figure of the teacher and the canonical literary texts they are assigned to read, and give them an opportunity to voice their opinions on what they learn in class. The political aims of this research are enacted through the thesis’ textual politics. It is “textual” because my study investigates a selection of narrative texts, namely literary and personal narratives about Thailand by the above-mentioned Western authors and by my Thai teacher and student participants. Said’s concept of “Orientalism” is employed as an analytical tool to understand and deconstruct the Orientalist representations of Thailand in those Western narratives. Analysis of the Thai participants’ personal narratives reveals their resistance to the Orientalist representations of Thailand in both the literary texts and real life situations, and the counter-discourse they use to deal with unequal power relations in such representations. Drawing on Said and other postcolonial thinkers as well as Bakhtin, I have shaped and presented my thesis as writing that speaks back to the metropolitan centre. Here the textual body of my thesis is transformed into a metaphorical contact space, which contains the multivoicedness of the heterogeneous Western voices and Thai voices, and where the Western power of representation is investigated and subverted.