Bangkok as Method: Arnika Fuhrmann and Chairat Polmuk

The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

This talk considers the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Bangkok cultural production. It shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. At the heart of this inquiry stand Shanghai and Hong Kong’s anomalous colonial temporalities and Thailand’s semi-colonial temporality of the “never” and “yet still” of colonization. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, this project reconceptualizes the revival of Bangkok’s Chinese pasts and demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and diasporic narratives of identity and collectivity beyond China.

Arnika Fuhrmann (Asian Studies/Comparative Literature, Cornell University; Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong) is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong (SUNY Press, 2020), and In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2026).

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A Rocking Road to the Moon: Poetics of Infrastructure 

Bangkok’s urban transformation is intimately tied to the history of Cold War-era infrastructure development, particularly the construction of highways linking the capital to provincial regions. Many of these U.S.-funded projects intensified administrative centralisation, facilitated natural resource extraction, and accelerated domestic migration. This talk addresses the material and affective entanglements at the heart of Bangkok’s urban history through the lens of infrastructural poetics (Larkin 2013). Drawing on literature, film, music videos, and art—including works by Tang Chang, Billy Ogan, Som Supaparinya, and Tada Hengsapkul—this talk examines how the promise of infrastructure in the making of Bangkok and its other “reorganizes spaces and practices in the glitch and suspension it creates” (Berlant 2022).

Chairat Polmuk is Assistant Professor in literary studies at the Department of Thai, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, where he teaches Southeast Asian languages and literature, cultural theory, and media studies. Currently, he also serves as Director of Chulalongkorn University’s Southeast Asian Studies program. His research focuses on affective and intermedial aspects of post-Cold War literature and visual culture, especially in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.