1950s Thailand
A01=Benjamin Tausig
acknowledgement
Author_Benjamin Tausig
Bangkok nightlife
blackness
Category=AVA
Category=JP
Category=NHTQ
cosmopolitanism
Duke Ellington
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
G.I. era in Thailand
jazz
Maurice Rocco
music
neocolonialism
Noble Sissle
Ohio
Oriental Hotel Thailand
Oxford
queerness
Thailand
Vietnam War
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031703
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
