American Book Award winner Jeff Chang at SMU on March 18

American Book Award winner Jeff Chang will visit SMU to give a lecture on his newest work, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in the Forum of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center.

The lecture is free and open to the public, and is presented by SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts and Office of Multicultural Student Affairs.

The book examines multiple questions about race, “the greatest social divide in American life.” How do Americans see race now? How has that changed – and not changed – over the past 50 years? 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, Who We Be remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin into a powerful, unusual and timely cultural history of the idea of racial progress.

Chang’s first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, among others. He edited Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop and is at work on two new books: Youth (Picador Big Ideas/Small Books series) and a biography of Bruce Lee (Little, Brown).

Chang serves as the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. He co-founded CultureStr/ke, an initiative focused on U.S. immigration policy, and the news site ColorLines. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. 

He has written for The Nation, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Foreign Policy, N+1 and Mother Jones. 

He was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”

For more information visit whowebe.net or call 214-768-1841.

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