Bangkok After Dark :Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies

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Bangkok After Dark

Bangkok After Dark :Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies

(Author)
4.00 (1 Ratings by Goodreads)
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Published: 29 April, 2025
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Description

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. As Tausig demonstrates, Rocco’s Blackness, queerness, and musical life in Thailand illuminate how Thai-American relationships complicated neat distinctions between the two countries. In teasing out these complexities through the figure of Rocco, Tausig challenges conventional understandings of the global Cold War on individual and transnational scales.
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Type Book
ISBN13 9781478031703
ISBN10 1478031700
Number Of Pages 264
Item Weight 363 g
Publisher / Reseller Duke University Press
Format paperback
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Media Reviews

“In this unique and important book, Benjamin Tausig tells the compelling journey of one Black, queer American man whose biography Tausig uses as a vehicle for another story about capitalist development in Thailand during the Cold War. We learn about the cultural effects of the US fiscal and military presence in Thailand, the development of and changes to colorism and to racial and farang identities in Thailand, the significance of the local and global circulation of musical genres, and much more. Bangkok after Dark is magnificent.” - Tamara Loos, author of Bones around My Neck: The Life and Exile of a Prince Provocateur

“Bangkok after Dark is a mysterious place, crowded with obscure forms, echoing with half-heard tales and forgotten melodies. Yet in the shadowed figure of Maurice Rocco, Benjamin Tausig brilliantly exposes the impacts of war, race, sexuality, performance, and identity in the multiple lives of a musician, a city, and a nation shaped at the margins of global history.” - David Novak, author of Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation

"Benjamin Tausig... traces [Maurice] Rocco's enigmatic story in his fascinating new book. . . . By looking at how nightlife developed during the period of Maurice Rocco's life in Thailand, Tausig reveals the neo-colonial roots of Thailand's huge entertainment industry and how they persist to the present day." - John Clewley Bangkok Post

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Author's Bio

Benjamin Tausig is Associate Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint.

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