This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Amiri Mahnzili, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching interests range across pan-African concerns with history, memory, expressive life, and radical political mobilization. With Lawson Bush and Edward C. Bush, he is co-author of Sankofa (Re)search Model: (Re)membevring, (Re)storing, and (Re)birthing Black Boys and Men (2025) In this conversation, we discuss the importance of pedagogy in Black Studies, radical politics, and the place of pan-African intellectual and political work for the history and future of the field.