Dr. Edwina Ashie-Nikoi is an archivist, historian and curator of the African/Diaspora experience. Her probing of culture and history began early, constantly asking (pestering!) her bemused parents and older kinfolk about their family and Ga ethnic histories. Having connected with various strands of blackness while growing up in Dubai, studying in the US and researching in the Caribbean and UK, she continues to be fascinated personally and academically with the ways peoples of African descent document themselves. Her scholarly research engages the myriad cultural records and indigenous knowledge peoples of Africa descent create as well as the institutions and processes involved in preserving them. Edwina currently teaches at the University of Ghana (UG)’s Department of Information Studies and is editorial coordinator of UG’s Institute of African Studies' Contemporary Journal of African Studies.  On today's episode, Dr. Ashie-Nikoi shares information about Ga naming practices, which are unique in Ghana. Ga names immediately identify one's clan, one's position among siblings, possibly even one's father's position among his siblings, one's clan, and possibly one's town of origin. 

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. Please submit proposals here.

Music by Sean Bempong.

In this episode, Dr. Maboula Soumahoro talks about her Côte d'Ivoire heritage and the complexities of being born in France.

Dr. Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English department of the University of Tours, France, where she also received her PhD. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies (Atlantic), Dr. Soumahoro has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France: Bennington College, Columbia University (New York and Paris), Barnard College, Bard Prison Initiative (Bayview Correctional Facility), Stanford University (Paris), Sciences Po (Paris and Reims), the prisons in Bois-d’Arcy, Villepinte (juvenile detention), and Fresnes. From 2013 to 2016, Dr. Soumahoro served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. Since 2013, she is also the president of the Black History Month (BHM), an organization dedicated to the celebration of Black history and cultures throughout the world. Dr. Soumahoro is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, La Découverte).

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. We understand that the global Black archival experience is a complex one and converging over time, space, and memory. We acknowledge and affirm archiving our stories is a cultural and political act. Learn more about the project here. 

Music by Sean Bempong.

Flip Couto is the Executive director of "Aliança Pró Saúde da População Negra" (Alliance for the Health of the Black Population), founder of Collective AMEM (group of black queer artists), dancer at Sansa-croma company and member of House of Zion.

He is an HIV+ brazilian dancer, performer, cultural mischief maker and curator who interrogates, redefines and creates a diverse range of spaces and actions athwart the periphery of São Paulo culture.

As a South American gay black male who is publicly open about his HIV status, Flip uses his own body as source material. Working within and across several companies, projects, different community groups and networks both physically and on online including --art, urban spaces, dance battles, balls, performances and theatre--his practice is always searching for a transit between these spaces, which provides and provokes a creative-socio-political conversation within the gaps and silences in the Brazilian QPOC community and the wider public.

In this interview, he speaks about the value of family, his biological family, his partner, and the House of Zion. 

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. Please submit proposals here.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

In this episode, librarian and genealogist Phillip Bond talks about the maternal and paternal matriarchs of his family, Venus Bond and Ella Dockery,  the impossible odds they had against them and the incredible legacy they left behind.

Phillip Bond has been working in public libraries for 15 years. Beginning his career as a public librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, he uses the diverse backdrop of the changing Brooklyn Borough to create projects, events, and programs around archives, photography, oral histories, podcasting, and genealogy. The Milwaukee native has a personal invested interest in the research of his African American Southern roots, by way of Tennessee and Arkansas, having traced his family lineage back 6 generations to the 1700's. He currently resides in Washington DC and works as an Adult Literacy and Technology Librarian in South East DC for the DC Public Library.

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. Please submit proposals here.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

Where are you from? Where are your families from? Dr. Stanton Biddle began his family research in response to these questions from classmates while in grade school in rural western New York State, which was largely white. His initial questions: when did his African American ancestors come to New York; where did they come from and why did they come? These questions gave way to other questions. Fortunately, his family had amassed significant documentation of their presence in New York going back many generations. In this episode, Dr. Biddle talks about applying his library research skills to his quest to document his family’s unique history. 

Dr. Biddle is a retired librarian whose career spanned nearly fifty years. He held positions at the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, Howard University, SUNY at Buffalo, and finally Baruch College at the City University of New York. His time at New York Public included seven years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where he served as reference librarian, archivist, and research project director. Dr. Biddle was born and raised in a rural and predominantly white area of western New York State. He has cultivated a lifelong interest in African American history and culture. His focus in retirement has been on genealogy, primarily involving his own African American family that has been based in western New York for over two hundred years.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

Eric Darnell Pritchard is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is also faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Eric is the author of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy and editor of “Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking,” a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Pritchard’s writings on fashion, popular culture, literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogies have been published in multiple venues including the International Journal of Fashion Studies, Harvard Educational Review, Visual Anthropology, Literacy in Composition Studies, and ARTFORUM. Currently, he is completing two books: a historical ethnography of Black queer feminist literacy activism and a biography of 1980s international fashion superstar Patrick Kelly.

In this episode, Eric shares a story about his family who suffered two house fires (one when he was an infant) and how family photographs gained an even more important significance his my elders that has been passed down in various ways. Learn more about Eric's work here: https://www.ericdarnellpritchard.com/

Original music by Sean Bempong.

If we are fortunate, we have our biological families and our chosen families. Our history as African Americans is a complicated, often painful one. As descendants of enslaved people, we lived with the omnipresent possibility of separation through the sale of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. After coming out to their family, many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people also suffered the loss of family members. This episode shares the beautiful story of Lee Levingston Perine and Patience, two queer African Americans who chose each other as family, a quality that both the Black and LGBTQ communities have been doing for centuries. 

Lee is a Washington, DC-based project manager, event planner and creative. He has planned or helped plan everything from weddings to nonprofit events to an LGBTQ+ music festival headlined by the Queen of Bounce, Big Freedia. He’s the founder of Makers Lab and his latest project is a virtual Black Pride Festival happening this May.

Patience is a creator, actress, vocalist, and writer native to Washington, D.C; a creative with a passion for the spoken word and sound healing. She is most recently recognized as the "Scat" of the Peace & Bodyroll Duo BOOMscat. Patience is an artist who creates collages for your listening pleasure. If you listen closely you may feel her heart between your ears.

Learn about Black in Space here!

Music by Sean Bempong 

Building a healthy life can be difficult. Doing it while engaging dysfunctional family members can be insufferable. Carla Whyte, an educator from Brooklyn, NY, knows this struggle intimately. As the only person in her immediate family to participate extensively in therapy, Carla considers what it means to strive to be well in a toxic family environment. The Brooklynite has been teaching for about a decade (ESL and history to middle and high schoolers), first in South Korea, then Liberia, Guinea, France, and now she is back in New York. Carla studied sociology as an undergraduate where she became fascinated with race relations in professional and collegiate spaces, as well as disparities in educational access, particularly for black people. While she enjoys teaching, Carla also has an interest in tapping into her creative side through blogging and podcasting.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

Join us this episode as we speak with Katherine “Kat” Cheairs, a filmmaker, educator, curator, activist and community artist. Kat’s areas of interest and research include: HIV & AIDS; visual culture; media arts therapy; community arts; and, critical race theory in art education. Ms. Cheairs is a co-curator of Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives and Activism, an archival exhibition focusing on the contributions of Black women, transwomen of color, and women of color HIV/AIDS activists from the early 1990s to the present. Ms Cheairs is the producer and director of the documentary, Ending Silence, Shame & Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family. Kat’s new project in development, In This House, is a video installation exploring HIV/AIDS narratives through the Black body. Kat has appeared and presented on panels at the Tribeca Film Institute, BAM, Pratt Institute, The New School, New York University, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Aperture Foundation, and UnionDocs.

Kat shares her memories of visiting her maternal grandparent's home in the summer time in Memphis, Tennessee. 

To listen to more podcasts, visit Nomadic Archivists Project.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem. She is the product of two merging streams of black history in New York City--immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother’s side and migrants from North Carolina on her father’s side who settled in Harlem in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. The second of eight children, that history was embedded in her mother’s view of life: as she would say, “you got three strikes against you. You poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books, and literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined the world her mother understood. She is the author of many books including Na-Ni, (1973); Spirits in the Street (1974); Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems & Drawings (1985); Don't Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1988) and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004) and Yabo (2014).

In this episode, Alexis talks about grief and loss as emotional states impacting black family life from her point of view. 

To listen to more podcasts, visit Nomadic Archivists Project.

Original music by Sean Bempong.