This event is a conversation with Benjamin Tausig, author of Bangkok after Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies, and Rianne Subijanto, author of Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia. About Bangkok after Dark: From the 1930s to the 1950s, jazz pianist Maurice Rocco was a mainstay in Hollywood and American nightlife scenes. As rock and roll surpassed jazz as America’s most popular music in the 1950s, the queer Black pianist’s fortunes faded and he was forced to go abroad for new opportunities. In 1964 Rocco settled in Bangkok, where he thrived and enjoyed a relatively privileged life until he was murdered by two young male sex workers in 1976. In Bangkok after Dark, Benjamin Tausig uses Rocco’s intriguing story to trace the history of transnational nightlife encounters between Thais and Americans during the long American war in Vietnam. Tausig shows how these encounters, which included musical collaborations, romantic and sexual relationships, and new labor, identity, and geopolitical configurations, remade Thailand in crucial and enduring ways. Tausig challenges conventional understandings of the global Cold War on individual and transnational scales. About Communication against Capital: Communication against Capital explores the revolutionary communication strategies of the pergerakan merah, the anticolonial "red movement" in 1920s Indonesia. Rianne Subijanto tells the story of ordinary lower-class women and children and people of diverse races and ethnicities who waged their battles against Dutch colonialism within multiple arenas of communication, including political associations, assemblies, printed matter, schools, and shipping lines. In this process, communist ideas merged with ideals drawn from the Enlightenment to shape the emancipatory spirit of Indonesians.
New York City, NY; NYC