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 Courtney Baker, who teaches in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. Along with numerous articles in public and scholarly venues on art and the aesthetic, she is the author of Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African-American Suffering and Death (2015). In a previous position, she was the co-founder and Chair of the Department of Black Studies at Occidental College. In this conversation, we discuss the place of art and aesthetic inquiry in Black Studies, the role of tradition in building knowledge in Black study, and the significance of the field for Black liberation struggle.