Dr Laura Kennedy, University College Cork
Monday February 16 2026, 5.15-7 pm, E002 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus
zoom link:
https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/91699307953?pwd=mb0ivPzcHBbigWLn5faxFDvYa3864t.1
In his 2005 short story collection, Sightseeing, Rattawut Lapcharoensap digs beneath the picture-perfect imagining of Thailand that has long been packaged for Western tourism by shining a harsh light on its realities for local inhabitants. A paradise only for “fools and farangs, for criminals and foreigners” (Rattwaut 2005), Rattawut’s Thailand is one whose land, ecosystems, and species have been exploited for consumeristic, capitalistic gain. From the slowly drowning Andaman Sea islands to the ulcer-riddled elephants trained for tourist trekking, his collection highlights the ecologically disastrous repercussions of exotic tourism, revealing how the
paradisiac vision of Thailand is no more than an illusion created for farangs, one that is sustained to the detriment of Thai land, people, and species.
This paper will read Rattawut’s collection as an exemplar of the fallout of the Capitalocene: as a manifestation of the fundamental role that the pursuit of capital has played on the large-scale transformation of the planet and ongoing climate crises. In assessing how Thai landscapes and species (human and non-human) have been mined to meet the Western consumer’s orientalist fantasies, I will use Sightseeing as a case study to examine how “capitalist-colonialist economic relations have […] pressed every sector of nature, including other human beings, into service providing un- or underpaid labor for the accumulation of capital” (Arons 2023). To this end, this paper will argue that Rattawut’s collection stages the ecological dangers of marketing the margins (Huggan 2001), turning such exotic marketing on its head through showcasing the devastation it produces.
Dr Laura Kennedy is a Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at University College Cork. She is a broad-based postcolonial literary scholar. She is the co-founder of the research network Literary Dislocation(s) and is a member of the managing committee of the COST Action: ‘Literary multilingualism and social transformations in superdiverse societies’. Her research has been published in journals such as Comparative Critical Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and The French Review, and her first monograph, on the politics and poetics of language in anglophone and francophone world literature, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.



