This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 Jarvis McInnis, who teaches in the Department of English at Duke University. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, he is author of Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, published by Columbia University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the rural Black south in Black Studies, the expansiveness of thinking and theorizing Black life, and how a Black Studies approach to archives and evidence broadens our notion of who does and what is intellectual work.