Organizer: Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University

Type/Location: In Person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

Join the Southeast Asia Program and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University for a talk by Benjamin Tausig, Associate Professor of Critical Music Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook University, who will discuss racial and gender identity shifts in Thailand during the 1960s.

In Thailand during the period of the American war in Vietnam, local categories of identity were upended by transnational encounter. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners from a multitude of countries, perhaps most markedly the United States, moved through Thailand in those years, transforming the country, including the scope of its legible identifications. Blackness, for example, was new to Thailand, as was the identity category called “gay,” which did not exist until 1965. Within spaces of transnational intimacy, new conceptions of selfhood emerged. Drawing on substantial archival evidence, and refracted through the case study of one Black American ex-patriot musician, this talk details how race and sex/gender were negotiated in a dialectic between existing conceptions of skin tone and desire in Thailand and new conceptions brought (and to some extent imposed) by foreign soldiers and capitalists.

About the speaker:

Benjamin Tausig is associate professor of critical music studies at SUNY-Stony Brook University in New York. His work centers on sound and politics, with a focus on Southeast Asia/Thailand. His first monograph, Bangkok Is Ringing (Oxford University Press, 2019), is an ethnography of the sound environment of the Red Shirt antigovernment protest movement in 2010-11. His second monograph, Bangkok After Dark (Duke, 2025), is a history of Thai-American nightlife relationships during the Cold War.

Registration link:

To attend the event in person, please register here.