An accidental Bangkok theme park

ABSTRACT

Bangkok's Nana precinct began as an Indian real estate venture in the 1920s and 1930s, then emerged as an R&R destination for American servicemen in the Vietnam War era. In the present time, it has become the main focus for Middle-Eastern tourism to Bangkok. It continues as an Indian commercial community in the remnants of an American recall, catering to an un-(anti-)American Middle-Eastern clientele in a milieu of frantic consumption, bright-light spectacle, un-Islamic music and surreptitious, forbidden pleasures. This extraordinary intersection of the incongruous is approached here through four perspectives which, it is suggested, are extendible to accidental urban theme parks generally: (1) as spectacle; (2) as cultural destabilization when spectacle is interrogated in a framework of multi-cultural, multi-voiced cacophony; then (3) when interrogated in a political economy context, as deconstructive of held assumptions attaching to both consumer society and global geopolitics; thence (4) at least potentially as globally transformative – the tourist as metamorphic agent in a dialectic of assemblage and ecosystem.