Description:

This talk, delivered by two presenters in conversation, includes two subject areas which meet.

First, Benjamin Tausig will offer a history of Thai nightlife in Bangkok and other cities beginning during the long American war in Vietnam. This period was the genesis of what we think of as “nightlife” in the country — a loosely regulated network of commercial opportunities in entertainment contexts. Thai nightlife today has its roots in the R&R (“rest and recuperation”) economies of the 1960s and 1970s, and involves many layers organized by ethnicity, class, and sexuality, among others. This talk presents a general history of this historical period and the ways that it shaped the centrally important nightlife economies of the present.

Second, Rory Fewer will present on the cultural politics of electronic dance music in Bangkok’s contemporary nightlife. Electronic dance music, which has its roots in the queer nightlife scenes of 1970s New York disco, 1980s Chicago house and Detroit techno, and 1990s Berlin techno, has historically been associated with forms of “underground” nightlife catering to non-mainstream tastes, marginal identities, and counter-cultural ideaologies. In the context of Bangkok, however, “underground” nightlife is increasingly viewed as an economic engine and form of soft power by Thailand’s political and business establishment. By surveying different nightlife formations in Bangkok, this talk will show how a lineage of “underground” electronic dance music is expedient to both subculture and mainstream forces.

Presenter:

Benjamin Tausig is a professor of music at SUNY-Stony Brook University in New York. His research focuses on sound and politics in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand. His first book, Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, was published in 2019, and adapted into an audio edition the same year. His second book, Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco and Cold War Global Nightlife, is a historical ethnography of cosmopolitan nightlife encounters in Thailand during the long American war in Vietnam, recently published by Duke University Press in 2025. Benjamin’s 2024 talk at Lifelong Learning Payap on the expatriate life of
Maurice Rocco was well received.

Rory Fewer  is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside. His work explores the intersections of popular music, queerness, materiality, and affect, particularly as they culminate in the vernacular practices of nightlife. His writing has been published in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, Documenta, and Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. He is currently working on an ethnography of queer rave collectives in Bangkok’s underground electronic dance music scene.

COST : 350 THB