Bangkok after Dark

Benjamin Tausig uses the biography of jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, an American ex-patriate living in Bangkok, to tell the history of transnational encounters between Thais and Americans during the long Vietnam War.

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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 ultimately 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 Vietnam War. 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 illuminates how Thai-American relationships complicated neat distinctions between the two countries. In teasing out these relationships through the figure of Rocco, Tausig challenges conventional understandings of the global Cold War on individual and transnational scales.