Eng-Beng Lim, "The Other Harem: Photographing Brown Boys"

CSREA Conference Room, Hillel 303, 80 Brown Street

What I Am Thinking About Now: Professor Eng-Beng Lim (TAPS) 

In this talk, Lim will explore the photographic troves of the ethnomusicologist, Colin McPhee and the artist, Walter Spies from the 1930s that focused on Balinese men and boys in recumbent poses that can be described as ethno-porn. The queer story of the white man/native boy, for which Lim accounts in his forthcoming book through Asian performance, is thrown asunder by these exotic snapshots, at once invoking and yet exceeding the visual representation of gendered power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. In the spirit of Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem, Lim is interested in the kinds of questions that may be raised around these photographs as a way to think about transnational visuality, performance and sexuality. 

What I Am Thinking About Now is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress.