All Events
DIVERSITY LECTURE
Who We Be: The Colorization of America Jeff Chang
MCC THEATER
Race. A four-letter word. The greatest social divide in American life, a half-century ago and today. How do Americans see race now? After eras framed by words like “multicultural” and “post-racial,” do we see each other any more clearly? From the dream of integration to the reality of colorization, Jeff Chang examines the cultural history of the idea of racial progress. Jeff Chang is Executive Director of Stanford's Institute for Diversity in the Arts and author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.
MULTIMEDIA
The Langston Hughes Project featuring the Ron McCurdy Project
MCC THEATER
The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes’s kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite featuring the Ron McCurdy Quartet. Ask Your Mama is a twelve-part epic poem in verse and music that served as Hughes’ social commentary on the struggle for freedom and equality among Africans and African Americans in the 1960s. This multimedia presentation includes spoken word, jazz quartet and videography chronicling the Harlem Renaissance and drawing musical cues from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop, “cha cha” and Afro-Cuban mambo music, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming. Dr. Ronald C. McCurdy is professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (USC) Free event! Limited Seating.
Race Matters Series
Mass Deportation and Global Capitalism in the 21st Century Tanya Golash-Boza
MCC THEATER
In the spring of 2014, President Obama’s administration reached a landmark of over 2 million deportations - more in under six years than the sum total of all deportations prior to 1997. Moreover, the vast majority of deportees are Latin American and Caribbean men. In this presentation, Prof. Golash-Boza will explain these racialized and gendered trends in immigration law enforcement in the context of global capitalism. Dr. Golash-Boza is associate professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced.
Cup of Culture
Maori Boy Genius
MCC THEATER
What if we could turn back the clock and watch the minds forming of those who would create political zeitgeist shifts in the future? MAORI BOY GENIUS does just that. It is a coming-of-age film profiling future Indigenous leader Ngaa Rauuira railing against his people’s statistics of uneducated youth, 40% of prisoners, and alarming suicide rates. Ngaa’s family of eight lives on a modest income but commits to a $35K Yale University bill with the weighty expectation that Ngaa will be the voice of his people. Pietra Brettkelly, 85 min., English/Maori with English subtitles, 2012, New Zealand.
