Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias by Eng-Beng Lim (review)

Abstract

Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Asias. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 256 pp.Eng-Beng Lim's Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Asias does something fresh with anthropology's usual suspects. Culture and ritual are shaken and undone a kinesthetic history of the-classically known kecak Bali. Power relationships are finessed a critical analysis of racial and sexual implications of homoerotic desire between rice queen and boy coupling, or what Lim terms colonial dyad. This dyad is both literally stereotype of white man/Asian boy couple a homosexual partnership, as well as discursive trope of white colonialism and feminized Asia a homoeroticized context.Lim sets precedence for his study when he explains that, the critical focus on native boy is crucial since he, unlike brown woman, is often cast as a superfluous character, a neglected critical trope, or [is] simply missing from archives (9). He grounds this focus by exploring effects of globalization on performance relation to nations' anxious embrace of queer capital. Lim takes us on sweeping stage-tours, starring Asian male as native boy love with white man around world (138). Smartly chosen, sites of transnational exposure book include Bali (the epicenter of what would become an illustrious tropical for American anthropologists and bohemian expatriates 1930s and 1940s), Singapore (considered a model of gloablizing democracy and capital Asia), and New York City (where artists still perform some of most significant works and Asian-diasporic performance). My main interest, says Lim, in foregrounding this well-known and yet unspeakable love story is way that it serves as an allegory for white man/native dyad that organizes production and reception of performance writ large (4). Succinct but dense, Lim's monograph is an indispensible contribution to literature queer post-colonialism and and Asian-diasporic racial formation.Lim's most entrancing chapter is his first. A Colonial Dyad Balinese Performance tracks social life of post-colonialism through one individual's homo-orientalist masterminding of national discourse through performance. Pulling curtain aside to reveal Indonesia's transformation from feudal colony to unspoiled tropical paradise 1930s (42), this chapter features homoerotic obsession with native boy and ethno-biodrama of Walter Spies, a German artist and Baliophile. Spies hosted a cafe salon of US household names such as Margaret Mead, Cole Porter, and Charlie Chaplin, who would shape global discourse of what later became a legendary destination far-east tropics. The performance at heart of his artistic homo-orientalism is kecak, a pulsating monkey dance (42) of 100 naked (60) moving concentric circles shadows of a ritualistic oil lamp. To this day, is performed only to tourists Bali. Under Spies's direction, kecak included significant changes to cak chorus and trance-dance derived from exorcistic ritual Sanghyang Dedari. Lim positions his analysis of kecak response to dominant academic thought that has, for decades, obfuscated relevance of Spies's homosexual relations with Balinese males relation to (60-65). Citing a corpus of literature that makes no mention of Spies's homosexuality, reactionary listserv exchanges, and public lectures where he received backlash, Lim sharply critiques erasure of Walter Spies's homo-orientalist fantasies about Bali, Spies's personal and ethical choices engaging with Balinese men and boys, and Spies's colonialist fantasy of Bali as conjured through his invention of kecak.To achieve this racial and queer critique Chapter 1, Lim offers an archival analysis of Spies's kecak. …