NYU Press Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias: 42 (Sexual Cultures)

·       “Fresh and compelling analyses… Always witty, sometimes hilarious, making this provocative new work of scholarship a pleasure and a revelation.” – Lisa Duggan, New York University “Finely crafted, meticulously analyzed, and intensely provocative multi-sited research… a touchstone for future works and debates…” – Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Review "All in all, this book manages to cast its own spells and seductions and in its rendering of the centrality of the erotic dyad of the white man/brown boy to colonial knowledge production, Lim makes significant and indelible contributions to the histories of global performance, the Asias, queer theory and cultural colonialism."--Jack Halberstam "Emisferica " "An important contribution to how to read, understand and & see Asia, especially where it concerns underlying power relations that still govern notions of agency, representation and identity."--Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology "Brown Boys and Rice Queens is an impressive feat that utilizes and challenges tropes in postcolonial studies, inter-Asia cultural studies, ethnic American studies, and theorizations of race and sexuality. Lims nuanced reading exposes their blind spots and extends the theorization of these allied fields in his sophisticated analysis of Asian queer performances. This book is a significant contribution to its major fields of queer studies and performance studies."--Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism "Brown Boys and Rice Queens ought to be required reading for anyone working in theatre and performance studies, Asian and Asian American studies, queer studies, or at any of their complex interfaces: at once historical and theoretical; close and deep in parts of his reading, yet contextualizing and synoptic at others; charmingly playful if also soberly earnest, as he insists on what is both ludic and serious about camp, Lim manages to do what, as his book demonstrates, the most fascinating inhabitants of white man / Native boy dyad likewise accomplish: he casts a spell, and it binds."--Modern Drama "Brown Boys and Rice Queensskillfully exfoliates the layers of erotic, political, and cultural investments in inter-racial queer intimacies between the Western desiring male subject and the nubile Oriental boy figure brought about by colonial anddiasporicencounters between Asia and the West.Limelegantly dissects the spell-binding cultural effects of this dyad and conjures new critical perspectives about race, sexuality, and performance. A finely crafted, meticulously analyzed, and intensely provocative multi-sited research, Brown Boys and Rice Queenswill be a touchstone for future works and debates in queer andperformance studies."--Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Brown Boys and Rice Queenstroubles the East/West binary relation that takes for granted the imperialist power of the West as absolute and the East as passive subjects to this power . . . . It proposes a rethinking of the meanings of native and ethnic by bridging the disparities in significance to postcolonial studies and ethnic studies."--Signs "Eng-Beng Lim is interested in many things, and they are all here inBrown Boys and Rice Queens. . . . Lim concludes that he has 'explored . . . the native boy and his transmogrifications in the queer Asias attuned to Orientalism, colonial homoerotics, and dyadic performance' and that he has. Alongside Katsuhiko Suganuma'sContact Momentsand Hoang Tan Nguyen'sA View From the Bottom, the queer Asian male is now getting to talk back. And he is not done"--The Journal of Asian Studies "Eng-Beng-Lims Brown Boys and Rice Queensdoes something fresh with anthropologys usual suspects...Power relationships are finessed in a critical analysis of the racial and sexual implications of homoerotic desire between the rice queen and Asian boy coupling."--Anthropological Quarterly "Lims book is invaluable, generati