This article examines the discursive construction of Muslim threat in contemporary Thailand, using William Shakespeare’s Othello as a comparative literary archive. It argues that anti-Muslim sentiment in Thailand persists through a recurring threat-grammar that renders Muslims legible as strangers, infiltrators, and internal enemies before any empirical proof is required. The article first identifies this grammar in Othello through close reading of hostile naming, civic alarm, insinuation, pseudo-proof, and terminal self-othering. It then traces comparable operations in the Thai ideological field through Jesada Buaban’s analysis of Muslim strangerhood and Buddhist nationalist discourse, and in a contemporary digital archive documented by Cofact Thailand. Informed by Teun A. van Dijk’s sociocognitive account of mental models and manipulation, the analysis shows how Thai election rhetoric and TikTok content manufacture Muslim threat through repetition, decontextualisation, and pseudo-factual laundering. The article concludes that Othello illuminates the hegemonic structure of this discourse, while the Thai archive reveals its contemporary operation as a low-intensity, digitally accelerated form of social permission. This study advances Shakespearean studies and Thai sociopolitical discourse by reframing Othello as an archive for theorizing Muslim threat-making in Thailand’s Buddhist-nationalist digital spheres. It shows how this threat comes to feel like common sense in Asia, revealing the democratic and social costs of discursive manufacture.
This article examines the discursive construction of Muslim threat in contemporary Thailand, using William Shakespeare’s Othello as a comparative literary archive. It argues that anti-Muslim sentiment in Thailand persists through a recurring threat-grammar that renders Muslims legible as strangers, infiltrators, and internal enemies before any empirical proof is required. The article first identifies this grammar in Othello through close reading of hostile naming, civic alarm, insinuation, pseudo-proof, and terminal self-othering. It then traces comparable operations in the Thai ideological field through Jesada Buaban’s analysis of Muslim strangerhood and Buddhist nationalist discourse, and in a contemporary digital archive documented by Cofact Thailand. Informed by Teun A. van Dijk’s sociocognitive account of mental models and manipulation, the analysis shows how Thai election rhetoric and TikTok content manufacture Muslim threat through repetition, decontextualisation, and pseudo-factual laundering. The article concludes that Othello illuminates the hegemonic structure of this discourse, while the Thai archive reveals its contemporary operation as a low-intensity, digitally accelerated form of social permission. This study advances Shakespearean studies and Thai sociopolitical discourse by reframing Othello as an archive for theorizing Muslim threat-making in Thailand’s Buddhist-nationalist digital spheres. It shows how this threat comes to feel like common sense in Asia, revealing the democratic and social costs of discursive manufacture.
