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 will discuss 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. See www.aaww.org/1989for more details.

Exhibits: The Canon, NEA Litigation

Free and open to the public

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