Thiti Jamkajornkeiat

Thiti Jamkajornkeiat
Position
Assistant Professor
Pacific and Asian Studies
Contact
Office: C218

Assistant Professor

Credentials

Ph.D., South & Southeast Asian Studies (Critical Theory Designated Emphasis), University of California-Berkeley

BA, Thai Language and Literature, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand)

Research Interests

- Comparative Southeast Asian intellectual history
- Modern Indonesia and Thailand
- Peripheral Marxism
- Anti-/post-/decolonial theories

Biography

I am a comparative Southeast Asianist specializing in the intellectual history of revolutionary Southeast Asia and the Global South, with an emphasis on Indonesia, Thailand, and the Bandung Afro-Asian milieu. I am a native speaker of Thai and fluent in Bahasa Indonesia. My interdisciplinary research is directed towards the tripartite objective of decolonizing Southeast Asian studies, reconstructing radical political theories from Global Asias, and advancing social justice in Southeast Asia. These three orientations foster a novel research paradigm that positions Southeast Asia as a global locus of knowledge co-production and prioritizes the livelihoods of Southeast Asians. I teach courses on activism, social justice, public humanities, and anticolonialism in 20th- and 21st-century Asia.

My intellectual inquiry into Southeast Asian knowledge production aligns with my theoretical interests in Marxist political theory, postcolonial geography, and Inter-Asia cultural studies. My recent publications, presentations, and organizing efforts are directed towards re-centering the interdisciplinary conversations on Global Southeast Asias—employing the plural form 'Asias' to encompass Southeast Asian diasporas across the globe. My work has been published in Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, Spectre, positions: politics, Verge, Indonesia, and Critical Times. I am a board member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society and an editorial member of positions: asia critique collective. I co-organized the 2025 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference and Historical Materialism East and Southeast Asia.

My first monograph recounts the intellectual history and political theory of left internationalism in Indonesia during the Bandung era. It argues that the 1955 Bandung Conference’s Afro-Asian connectivity enabled Indonesian radicals to formulate a left internationalist framework capable of coordinating global struggles against capitalist empires in the aftermath of the Comintern’s dissolution. I have been concurrently developing a conjunctural framework of “Internationalist Southeast Asias” to historicize internationalist struggles against colonial capitalism in Global Southeast Asias throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Selected Publications

2026    “Amidst the Dialectical Field of Southeast Asian Voices: A Note on Jeffrey Hadler’s Method,” Indonesia 121 (Apr.): 55–58.

- This commemorative piece to my late advisor Jeffrey Hadler centers on the methodological question of voice in Indonesia/Southeast Asian Studies. I suggest that Jeff’s scholarship assembled a dialectical field in which polyphonic voices strain to form meaningful new worldviews, rather than merely recuperating them.

2025    “Radicalizing ‘Bandung’ in Cairo: Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Renewal of Anticolonial Marxism,” Critical Times 8, 3 (Dec.): 436-469.

- This essay develops the notion of Left Third Worldism as a variant of anticolonial Marxism from thinkers in the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), whose conjunctural analyses of colonial capitalism, I argue, radicalize Bandung.

2025    “History with Documents: New Research on the Indonesian Left,” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 41 (1 Sep.). [online].

- This special issue is among a few focusing on the Indonesian Left, wherein all contributors are Indonesian, and each essay is translated into seven Asian languages. The varied scholarly interests indicate a shift in the material conditions of research from deconstructive critique to critical reconstruction.

2024    “Archipelago of Solidarity: Southeast Asia as a Relational Region,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, 2 (Fall): 7-13.

- I employ a geographical-materialist perspective to develop a relational understanding of Southeast Asia that facilitates the coordination of dispersed internationalist struggles within the region and enables its continuous redefinition.

2024    “Lenin, Mao, and Third World Marxism: The Sino-Soviet Split Over Decolonization,” positions:politics Issue 10: Maoism on the Move (Jan.). [online].

- I argue that wartime Lenin provides a theoretical foundation for “global Maoism” that constitutes Third World Marxism’s anti-imperialist praxis.  

2020    “Down with Feudalism, Long Live the People! The People Against Royalism in Thailand Today,” Spectre (3 Dec.). [online].

- This essay engages Thai Marxist Jit Phumisak in dialogue with historian Thongchai Winichakul to elucidate the systemic contradictions between the “feudalists” (sakdina) and “the people” (ratsadon) that characterized the protests in 2020-21.

2017    “Southeast Asia, Surprisingly,” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 21 (Apr). [online].

- This reflection discusses contingency as the condition of possibility for the emergence of Southeast Asian studies that could oppose the dominant construction of the field.

Keynote Addresses

2025    Pursuing the Common Good: Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Studies

Keynote Roundtable with Alvin Tolentino, Juliet Lu, Nguyen Dang Anh Minh, and Realisa Darathea Masardi, Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies Conference, University of Victoria, Canada, 23-25 October.

2025    Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies? – Redux

Keynote Address, Decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies, Chiangmai University, Thailand, 17-19 July.

2025    Internationalist Southeast Asias in Conjunctures

Keynote Address, Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 5 April.

Recent Public Talks

2026    Towards Reinventing Left Third-Worldism as Anticolonial Marxism from the People’s Bandung

The Marxist Literary Group, University of California-Berkeley, 16-20 June.

2026    Racial Justice, Culture of Solidarity, and Indigenous Acknowledgment in Community Leadership

Asian Community Leadership Bootcamp, Asia in Victoria, 16 May.

2026    Radicalizing ‘Bandung’ in Cairo: Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Renewal of Anticolonial Marxism

60 Years of the Tricontinental Conference: Context, Impact, Legacy, and Future, La Universidad de La Habana, 12-15 January.

2025    ‘The Myth of the Lazy Native’: A Southeast Asianist Text on Colonial Racial Capitalism

Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies Conference, University of Victoria, Canada, 23-25 October.

2025    Port Workers of Four Continents Unite for West Papua: Global Marxism and Anti-Systemic Struggles from Third-Worldist Indonesia

The Power of Marxist Thought, York University, Canada, 26-27 September.

2025    Asia as Method, Bandung as Praxis, World as End

Plenary Panel, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference, Walailak University, Thailand, 23-25 July.

2025    Anticolonialism in Three Serialities: Capital, Empire, Resistance

New Histories of Capitalism in Southeast Asia, National University of Singapore, 7-8 July.

2025    Transpacific Contradictions

Transpacific Marxism: Theory, Practice, Solidarity, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 25 April.

2025    Global Marxism and Decolonization

Public Lecture, The Historical Materialism Study Group of the Catalan Society of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona, 21 March.

2025    Global Asias as Uneven Sites of Marxist Theorization

Global Asias Conference, University of California-Irvine, 22 February.

Media & Online Features

Courses

PAAS171                  Introduction to Modern Southeast Asian Cultures

PAAS/HSTR253         Activism in Asia

PAAS309                  Human Rights and Social Justice in the Asia-Pacific Region

PAAS372                  Southeast Asian Cinema

PAAS440/HSTR460   Anticolonial Movements in Asia

PAAS590                 Directed Readings (Critical Foundations of Southeast Asian Studies)