Humber Liberal Arts @ Toronto International Festival of Authors
Keynote address: Jeff Chang
Date: October 27, 3:30 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Price: $25 for non-conference participants
Location: Studio Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queen's Quay West, Toronto
Other People’s Property: Exchange and Appropriation In Hip-Hop In The Era of Resegregation and Racial Violence
In recent years, debates over cultural appropriation across the arts have surged back to the fore. As an engine of creative language and a mode of Black Freedom culture central to global pop, hip-hop has become a key site of contestation. How do we think about language, culture, and race in this moment? What are the possibilities of exploitation and liberation in hip-hop’s imaginary?
Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music.
His first book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, garnered many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He edited the book, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop.
Who We Be: The Colorization of America (St. Martin's Press) was released on October 2014 to critical acclaim. It was published in paperback in January 2016 under the new title, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (Picador). The book won the Ray + Pat Browne Award for Best Work in Popular Culture and American Culture and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Books For A Better Life Award.
His latest book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (Picador), was published in September 2016. It was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book Of The Year, and the Washington Post declared it “the smartest book of the year.” His next project is a biography of Bruce Lee (Little, Brown).
Jeff has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. He was named by The Utne Reader as one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” by KQED as an Asian Pacific American Local Hero, and by the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts as one of its 2016 YBCA 100 list of those “shaping the future of American culture.” With H. Samy Alim, he was the 2014 winner of the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award at Stanford University. Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. He has written for The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Foreign Policy, N+1, Mother Jones, Salon, and Buzzfeed, among many others.
Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i, he is a graduate of ‘Iolani School, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.