| Summary/Abstract |
This article re-examines the significance of Senee Saowaphong’s canonical Thai novel Peesart (The Spectre) in two key ways: by locating this work in the context of the rapid economic and social changes that took place in Thailand after the Second World War, and by identifying the modernist impulse as an underlying novelistic structure that forms and informs the clashes between the aristocrats and the commoners and between the urban and the rural. Employing Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and Anderson’s double provincialism, the article rereads the novel’s protagonist, Sai Seema, an iconic hero of the 1970s Thai student movement, as a hybrid figure. It is the ambivalence and undecidability of this character that destabilizes and subverts the power and authority of Bangkok elites in the text.
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