When the East Is in the House: Streetwear and the Lure of Global Youth Culture in China
Dr. Robeson Taj Frazier is a writer, cultural historian and professor of communication at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Through writing, education, and speaking/presentations, he explores the power of the arts, political and expressive cultures, and urban cultures in the United States, China, and elsewhere, with a specific focus on what these cultures communicate regarding histories and current-day dynamics of race, masculinities, creativity, and cultural traffic and exchange. He is the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014), co-producer of the documentary film It’s Yours, was on the Scholarship Steering Committee for the audio-visual and traveling art platform Question Bridge: Black Males, and is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Race and Policy and Communication, Culture, & Critique. He is also the director of IDEA (The Institute for Difference & Equity at Annenberg), a USC-Annenberg collective that organizes and facilitates media, critical theory, and art-based interdisciplinary education, research, and programming. IDEA is committed to exploring the redemptive and transformational capacities of media, the arts, and culture, with specific attention to what they illuminate about identity, difference, and power. Dr. Frazier is also one of the founders and coordinators of RAP (Race, Arts, and Place-Making) at USC, an interdisciplinary initiative that examines the role that the arts and culture play in communities of colors’ efforts to define urban spaces and which links Los Angeles-based scholars, activists, community members and artists.