In this talk, Lim will examine the architectural and botanical performance of Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay as a way of engaging new iterations of island sexuality. At once a sci-fi botany fantasy and a postcolonial super garden of the twenty-first century, the Gardens presents an island botany complex that internalizes imperial horticultural display for an electric tropicality powered by biodiversity, sustainable energy, and a global ambition for the post colony. Lim will consider ways of reading this complex through its award-winning cooled conservatories and Supertree Grove. He will also be speaking about this work in relation to his monograph, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU Press, 2013) as a way to think about transnational performance and sexuality more broadly.

Eng-Beng Lim is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and Undergraduate Director of Performance Studies at Brown University. He is affiliated with the Department of American Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and a board member of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. He is part of the editorial collective of Social Text and on the board of Theatre Research International.