Organizer: Book Culture; SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
Join Book Culture and the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium on Wednesday, July 9th at 7pm for 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.
Featured Books:
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. 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.
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. Existing communication technologies were repurposed into mechanisms of struggle and used as weapons in anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance. In this process, communist ideas merged with ideals drawn from the Enlightenment to shape the emancipatory spirit of Indonesians. This red enlightenment motivated the production of revolutionary communication strategies of mobilization.
Subijanto's innovative work shows that the novel techniques of the pergerakan merah served to shift anticolonial mobilization in Indonesia from warfare to modern forms of communication.
About the Authors:
Benjamin Tausig is associate professor of critical music studies at SUNY–Stony Brook University. He is the author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford UP, 2019), and Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies (Duke UP, 2025). He teaches courses on Southeast Asian music, sound studies, and music and politics.
Rianne Subijanto is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is the author of Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2025).
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.