“American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, a major concert performer and minor film star of the 1940s, began fading from fame in the 1950s, while still only in his 30s. By 1960, he had moved to Thailand to restart his career in the fertile musical fields that spread around the American intervention in Southeast Asia. Emigrating gave Rocco new gigs and new audiences, and he found success arguably beyond what he had enjoyed in his earlier heyday. But Thailand also afforded him anonymity — especially racial and sexual anonymity — that he could not have hoped for in the U.S. This anonymity, quite reasonably and by all accounts, was a happy turn in Rocco’s life, especially in an age when McCarthyist homophobia and racism were reaching a fever pitch.

Rocco’s biography, however, raises complex questions for historical research. To the extent that Rocco’s years in Thailand were lived in deliberate privacy, how can they best be considered, understood, and represented in research? This question parallels recent work on imagining new kinds of archives (Doreen Lee, others), and on reflecting on archival absences (Saidiya Hartman, others), as it takes up the case of a figure whose story left few archival traces. However an archive of Rocco’s life was not repressed by a self-interested state, but by Rocco himself. How are scholars to handle questions of self-imposed anonymity — methodologically as well as ethically?”