Sino-Thai identity in contemporary Thai media and literature: generational difference in a post-assimilation formation

Information from the abstract

This article examines how contemporary Thai literature and popular media stage, negotiate, and revalue Sino-Thai identity across generations. It argues that Sino-Thai identity is best understood not through a linear model of assimilation or cultural loss, but as a post-assimilation formation whose meanings shift across generational and media contexts. Through close readings of Thai-language fiction, films, and television series, it shows how Chineseness moves from an object of anxiety among Baby Boomers, to normalized hybridity within the Gen X–Y urban middle class, and, for Gen Z, to an affective, cultural, and linguistic repertoire newly valued under conditions of precarity, regional media circulation, and Chinese transnationalism. Treating literature and media as cultural forms that publicly produce and contest ethnic meanings, it reframes Sino-Thai identity as mediated, situational, and historically reworked, demonstrating the value of generational analysis for understanding the complexity of ethnic formations in contemporary Thailand.

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Related topics: Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies