CAS Initiative Lecture: "Renegade Royalist: Anti-Monarchical Politics and Affect in Thai History" by Tamara Loos

• Event Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2013
• Time: 4:00 pm–5:30 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

The Center for Advanced Study's Initiative on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts is an ongoing project pursuing interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and law. We take as our focus the frictions obtaining among multiplicities of justice, including issues of social order and state power, terrorism and ultranationalism, sustainability and economic development, and medical law and ethics. We explore the vexed history of applying international law principles developed in the West; the imposition of ideas of personhood through biomedical ethics and law; inter-state collaboration and conflict in defining terrorism; cultural approaches to financial regulation and monetary policies; and problems in law and economics arising from globalization.

"Renegade Royalist: Anti-Monarchical Politics and Affect in Thai History" Tamara Loos Department of History, Cornell University

The talk focuses on the life of a renegade Thai prince named Prisdang (1851-1935), who spent half of his life abroad in political exile. He has been expunged from the mainstream record of Thai history but is well-positioned for a comeback because of his critique of Siam’s absolute monarchy in the 1880s and his (reluctant) enmity with that country’s most beloved and respected historic king, Chulalongkorn. Prince Prisdang’s decision to live in exile in 1890 has been considered a form of self-exile because the government never officially ordered his exile, his imprisonment, or his execution. However, the prince believed his life was at stake. The details of his decision-making process reveal that in the juridical and political context of turn of the century Siam, no genuine difference existed between the concepts of exile by government threat and self-exile. The talk will explore parallels with notions of self-censorship in Thailand’s explosive high-stakes context of lèse majesté today. It also critiques the discipline of history’s demand for causality, which too often eclipses efforts to present a fuller, humanizing view of the social context in which decisions were made and actions taken. Privileging causality prioritizes certain historical details over others but only in retrospect, in the act of constructing history. I weave the individualized, emotive dimension into historical scholarship to bring contingency and specificity to the writing of history. These microhistories reveal subjective experiences of the world in a way that engages the reader in an intimate dialogue with history and role of affect in narrative nonfiction.

This Center for Advanced Study event is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study, College of Law, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of English, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, George A. Miller Endowment, and Ledyard R. Tucker Fund.