AFTER 1989: I Love the '90s March 27, 2012

451 West Street, New York, NY

Featuring: DREAM HAMPTON, VIJAY PRASHAD, SOPHIA CHANG, JOHN KUO-WEI TCHEN
Exhibits: Wu-Tang Clan, "Heritage Holidays," Gender + Hip Hop

DJ hit replay! Or shall we manually rewind this nostalgic cassette tape with a discerning finger for your favorite awkward 1990s multiculti blunders? The 1990s gave us "Sister Souljah moments," the OJ Simpson hearings, the rise of xenophobic legislation (Prop 187 and 209) and homophobic punditry on national television (Jerry Falwell vs the Teletubbies).Carolina González (WNYC, Nueva York: the Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs) discusses the rise of "The Crossover," by which ethnic pop products migrate to the mainstream. John Kuo-Wei Tchen (New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture) sits us down for the origin stories of "heritage holidays" and "multiculturalism centers." Vijay Prashad (The Karma of the Brown Folk) gives a short talk on how the demise of multiculturalism has left racism alive and kicking in colorblind Obama-America. Prashad joins a panel conversation with dream hampton, former editor of The Source and Rap Pages and ghost writer for Jay-Z's Decoded, and Rinku Sen (Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization), president of the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines.

This is the fifth event in the five-part series AFTER 1989: Race After Multiculturalism, presented by The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

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AFTER 1989: Race After Multiculturalism

The '90s are back! Although they're being resurrected in youth culture as the age of Cosby sweaters, animated gifs and 16-bit Nintendo soundtracks, the 1990s were at once the age of multiculturalism, premised on the idea that we could all just get along, as well as a decade divided with tense, often surreal, racial spectacle. Think O.J. Simpson, the rise of Hip Hop and grunge, The Joy Luck Club, the canon wars, the death of Selena, Rodney King, and affirmative action. 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 can the era of multiculturalism--a decade of awkward rehearsals on how to talk about race--offer our own post-multicultural but not post-racial age?
See aaww.org/after1989 for more details.