« Kit de Waal: ‘Make room for working class writers’
“You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.” »

Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy

Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy

Intersection
KBIA 91.3 FM
Columbia, Missouri
2018-02-06

Sara Shahriari, Abby Ivory-Ganja & Elena Rivera

This week on Intersection, we bring you excerpts from author Junot Díaz’s Jan. 22 talk at MU [University of Missouri].

Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer prize for his first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” He received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and co-founded the Voices of Our National Arts Foundation, which holds workshops for writers of color. He is a professor of writing at MIT.

Díaz immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United State when he was six. In his literary work and activism, he tackles issues including immigration, assimilation and oppression.

His speech was part of the MU Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. event. During the talk, Díaz spoke about white supremacy, the role of artists and the lasting effects of slavery…

Read the story here. Listen to the speech (00:28:27) here.

Tags: , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2018 at 01:55Z and is filed under Articles, Audio, History, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Slavery, Social Justice, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.