AFTER 1989: Race After Multiculturalism

The '90s are back! Although they're being resurrected as the age of Cosby sweaters, animated gifs and 16-bit Nintendo soundtracks, the 1990s were stranger and more complex than youth culture nostalgia. As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War came to a close, the US found itself in the age of multiculturalism, premised on the belief we could all just get along, and a decade divided with tense, often surreal, racial spectacle. The Asian American Writers' Workshop presents an alternative racial history of the 1990s through a feisty five-part event series that's part symposium, part late night talk show, part Youtube nostalgia-fest.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Race?

Monday, March 5, 2012, 7PM 
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street  Brooklyn, NY
Free to the public

THE CANON, PC AND RACIST SHOW-AND-TELL

Featuring: HAROLD AUGENBRAUM (National Book Foundation), ROBERTO BEDOYA (Tucson Pima Arts Council), SACHA JENKINS (Ego Trip Magazine), ASHOK KONDABOLU (Das Racist), JEFFERSON MAO (Ego Trip Magazine), LATOYA PETERSON (Racialicious), HIMANSHU SURI (Das Racist), THUY LINH TU (NYU), VICTOR VAZQUEZ (Das Racist)
 
Exhibits: The Canon, NEA Litigation

Much of ‘90s multiculturalism was less about race than inventing polite ways to talk about racial taboos. Terms like “diversity” and “political correctness” blunted the unsavory aspects of dealing with racism, even as the right struggled to make English the national language and tamp down transgressive art, multicultural threats to the canon, and Ebonics. To kick off AFTER 1989, Ego Trip Magazine, the folks who gave us The Big Book of Racism, curates a slideshow of racialized advertisements—with call and response by hip hop trio Das Racist, who will judges the caliber of the images from quirky, race-conscious to downright, “Yo, that’s racist!” National Book Foundation Executive Director Harold Augenbraum, early proponent of Latino and Asian American literature, discusses the canon. Roberto Bedoya discusses the litigation between artist Karen Finley and the National Endowment for the Arts at the height of the Culture Wars—for which he was co-plaintiff. NYU Professor Thuy Linh Tu interviews Latoya Peterson, editor of Racialicious—the preeminent blog at the intersection of race and pop culture—to break down how the Internet has unleashed the Pandora’s Box of racial discourse. 

A project of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where we’re inventing the future of Asian American intellectual culture.

  1. jeralee-freeman reblogged this from steadyblogging
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  3. steadyblogging reblogged this from after1989 and added:
    tonight in Dumbo, an Asian American Writers’ Workshop project:...follow, but must have...
  4. sometimesiwear reblogged this from after1989 and added:
    i’ll be there!
  5. powerhousearena reblogged this from after1989 and added:
    Our friends at AAWW present...their Race After Multiculturalism talk here on 3/5.
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