With impressive research, engaging analysis, and witty and compelling narrative, Eng-Beng Lim successfully presents a fresh new angle to address gendered East–West relations at the global level. Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias focuses on what Lim calls, “the colonial dyad” (xi), the relationship between the white man and the native boy in the context of homoerotic orientalism. In the postcolonial context, the white man–brown woman heterosexual dyad is already a familiar trope, as seen in Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon; brown boys, however, have not come under critical examination in the homoerotic dyad of white man–brown boy. Lim defines the native/brown boy as “a figurative consignment of colonial modernity, at once the love child of predatory capitalism, queer orientalism, and the white male artist-tourist on the casual prowl for inspiration and sex” (9). The infantilized and exoticized native boy (and his nation) needs to be domesticated and disciplined by the white man (and his nation). Familiar Western paternalism toward the Third World countries manifests itself in a new homoerotic context.
Brown Boys and Rice Queens focuses on three sites: colonial Bali (1900–42), postcolonial Singapore (1990–2010), and diasporic Asian America (1990–2010). Through his playful performative and theoretical crossings and “cruisings” (14; pun intended), Lim analyzes the multiple formations and affective “spells” (xi) of the colonial dyadic legacy in these interconnected sites, cultures, nations, and dyadic and power relations. Queer Asia is multiplying.
Chapter 1, “A Colonial Dyad in Balinese Performance,” is the core of this book. It focuses on kecak, the “monkey dance” (42) with a large brown boy chorus, and Walter Spies (1895–1942), the German expatriate artist and rice queen. From the archives at the Leiden University to the e-list newsletter BACN (Balinese Arts and Culture News), Lim extracts valuable data to demonstrate Spies's crucial involvement in shaping kecak, Bali's modernity, and the Western epistemology of Bali. Derived from Sanghyang ritualistic-possession dance, kecak was secularized and “queered” through Spies's choreography, with its elimination of female dancers and addition of Ramayana narrative as dramatic backdrop. Kecak became the symbol for a modern Bali, a homoerotic paradise, (inter)national park, and museum of “‘traditional’” (51) arts and cultures under the colonial gaze. Even more significantly, Spies was instrumental in fashioning the Western conceptualization of Balinese culture: he brought his version of Balinese dance to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, and it became known by later generations as a model for the Oriental theatre through Artaud's inspiring manifesto Theatre and Its Double; Spies also served as Margaret Mead's local informant for her famous film Trance and Dance in Bali (filmed in 1939), which has for many years been considered a valuable source for studying so-called authentic Balinese ritualistic dances. Through his captivating narrative, Lim explains how colonial violence, be it the erasure of Balinese agency through Dutch narratives of puputan (massacre) or the reconstruction of a new identity through museumification, has helped construct the spellbinding spectacle of a tropical paradise.
“The Global Asian Queer Boys of Singapore,” Chapter 2, analyzes Singapore's “coming out” (97) as a modern nation through its “pink-dollar industries” (96) and a campy Anglophone performance, Asian Boys Vol. 1 (2000) by playwright Alfian Sa'at. Inspired by Strindberg's A Dream Play, Sa'at has the main character, Indra, take a queer journey encountering brown boys across the homoerotic Singapore landscape, where “everything (gay) [is] possible and plausible” (102). Asian Boys Vol. 1 envisions “a queer history and space in the face of Singapore's ambiguous censorship of homosexuality” (102)—homosexuality is still illegal in this Asian gay capital. Lim proposes to examine performances through the lens of what he calls “glocalqueering,” which “configures an inter-Asian diasporic framework that produces new models of cross-cultural understanding about queer sexuality aligned with recent studies that imagine alternative ways of conceptualizing traditions, affiliations, kinship, genealogies, and citizenship” (96).
The third and final full chapter, “G.A.P. Drama, or The Gay Asian Princess Goes to the United States,” analyzes lingering M. Butterfly and Suzie Wong syndromes in Asian America. The chapter focuses on a solo show, Go; or, The Approximate Infinite Universe of Mrs. Robert Lomax (1994) by the Malaysian-born, Singapore- and U.S.-educated performance artist Justin Chin. Suzie Wong, now Mrs. Lomax, is stuck in her marriage with an aging rice queen who is infatuated with a little Thai boy. A colonial legacy and queer tourism manifest themselves across the Pacific Ocean, in the United States as well as Asia. Compared with the extensive research and larger scope of analysis (nationhood, modernity, socioeconomics, and history as well as queer performance) of the previous chapters, Chapter 3 appears less impressive. The white man–brown boy dyad has less discursive power in the Asian American context.
By constantly shifting his analytical lens, Lim casts a tropical spell over his readers as they take the erotic colonial–postcolonial–Asian American journey with him. I would have liked him to linger a bit longer at some sites in his fantastical cruising in order to investigate better certain ideas, such as erotohistoriography. I also think the book, whose approach is somewhat ethnographical, would benefit greatly from allowing more native voices to be heard, such as when the native historian Ide Gde Ing Bagus recounts his experience of being “Balinized” (79). The native boys smile charmingly in the black and white photos, but their voice is not yet loud and clear.
Through his analysis of the colonial dyad, Eng-Beng Lim opens up a new space for investigating intercultural encounters and queer performances at the global level. His provocative scholarship has also made a significant contribution to the fields of performance studies and queer studies.
