Presenter Jittapim (Nan) Yamprai, Assistant Professor of Music and Head of the Music Library, Northern Illinois University will discuss “Political Revolution and Its Cultural Crisis: Disruption in the Performing Arts of Thailand from the 1932 Coup to World War II”

Thailand's tradition of monarchy goes back to the Sukhothai period in the thirteenth century. Over the centuries that followed, successive rulers refined and used royal power in different ways, and each reign's political ideology shaped the nation through times of peace and war. Around the turn of the twentieth century, aristocratic and wealthy Siamese families began sending their sons to Europe to study military science, law, and politics in Germany, England, and France. In 1932, a group of these European-educated civilians, most of them trained in France, joined forces with discontented military officers and overthrew Siam's absolute monarchy. King Prajadhipok (Rama VII) agreed to their demands to avoid bloodshed and became the country's first constitutional monarch. The changes reached far beyond the political system. Under the new leadership, and increasingly under military rule, people's daily lives, cultural practices, and traditions were redirected to serve the state. The country itself was renamed Thailand in 1939. This talk looks at how centuries-old Thai traditions in the performing arts, including Thai classical music and Western music in Thailand, were affected, changed, distorted, and reinvented to serve the ideology of the political leaders from 1932 to the end of World War II. It also shows how the 1932 revolution became a turning point that continues to shape Thai culture today.