AFTER 1989: White Noise March 8, 2012

VANILLA ICE, GRUNGE, AND STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE
Featuring: DAVID ROEDIGER (Wages of Whiteness), CHRISTIAN LANDER (Stuff White People Like), REIHAN SALAM (Daily Beast), DAN CHARNAS (The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop).

Exhibits: Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” Grunge and Sassy Magazine
Titled after Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which identity politics reaches its reductio ad absurdum in a Hitler Studies department, our second AFTER 1989 installment explores the curious phenomenon of white ethnic identity in the 1990s. We’ve asked influential US labor historian and pioneer of critical whiteness studies, David Roediger (Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class), to join Christian Lander, the mind behind the meme and NY Times bestselling book Stuff White People Like, and Daily Beast contributor Reihan Salam to talk about white racial formation. We’ll have short talks on pivotal ‘90s whiteness moments like grunge, Vanilla Ice, and the rise of Sassy magazine by Dan Charnas (The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop) and others.
This is the second event in the five-part series AFTER 1989: Race After Multiculturalism. More info below.
--

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?
A project of The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

See aaww.org/after1989 for more details.

Official Website: http://after1989.tumblr.com/post/18041832828/white-noise