Events By Quarter
Forgivable Whiteness: Sports, Race and the Last of the Great White Hopes Ben Carrington
MCC Theater
Ben Carrington will argue that sport has become the preeminent public space for the performance of white heterosexual masculinity that is underpinned by supra-national discourses of family. He examines the emergence of a particular form of white American masculinity, encapsulated in the term “the Great White Hope”. The expression, the Great White Hope, reveals how, in this moment in the early twentieth century, white masculine identity was produced as a negation of blackness. Carrington contrasts the “unforgivable blackness” of the current black athlete in contrast to the “forgivable whiteness” of the white athlete, and reflects upon the elevation of the white quarterback (the last of the Great White Hopes) within American culture in the context of what Ta-Nehisi Coates has referred to as America’s First White President. Dr. Ben Carrington is Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California.
Migration Is Natural: An Evening of Spoken Word Jess X Snow
MCC in SB
Migration is Natural is a hybrid spoken word poetry show, film screening and artist talk. Jess will talk about how she created a home for herself in her art and story-telling. She will share about her coming of age journey as an artist–how after the rootlessness and migrations that marked her childhood, she developed a stutter which she overcame through her discovery of visual and written language. Through her poetry, she channels the spirit of queer Chinese photographer Ren Hang, her immigrant mother, her ancestors and explores the creation of love and safety in the time of Trump America, and the queerness of the four billion year old mother Earth.
Constelacion de Sonidos, songs and stories of love, migration, displacement and resistance Los Cambalache
MCC Theater
Cambalache, meaning exchange, is a chicanx/jarochx ensemble based in LA. We will be playing traditional son jarocho music, while bringing our Chicanx experiences and soundscape through verse and dance. In the spirit of the fandango, a traditional celebration of music and dance, Cambalache engages its audience through participatory performances. Cambalache is active in the dialogue between Chicanos in the U.S. and Jarochos in Veracruz, thus strengthening decades of social and cultural exchange of the Chicano-Jarocho network.
$5 for UCSB students and youth under 12; $15 for general admission.
Purchase tickets here: https://goo.gl/c2pM1b
Creative Writing Workshop
Enacting Identity through Writing Ali M. Rahman
MCC Lounge
Discourse cannot exist independently from cultures and ideologies, and therefore when we write we are inherently enacting our own identities in the process. This workshop will explore how we are able to give voice to our experiences and engage with audiences about race, gender, sexual identity, and more through the particularly intimate medium of creative writing. Through discussion, reading, and writing, we will contemplate authenticity, what it means to find truth through fiction, especially when our own voices are co-opted by others. Led by Ali M. Rahman (Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature and M.F.A. in Creative Writing), the workshop will include onsite writing activities but writers are also encouraged to bring in their own work (poems, personal essays, flash fiction, or other short works) as it relates to their own identity.
RSVP for Feb 13th here: http://goo.gl/btjcdM
