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 Fanon Che Wilkins, who teaches in the Department of History at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. His teaching and research work focuses on the history of Black radicalism across the Atlantic world, with particular focus on pan-African thought, congresses, and mobilizations in the mid- and later-twentieth century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational solidarity, the complexity of radical politics in Black Studies, and the transformative work of historical research and writing for political and cultural action.