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 Kameelah Martin, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the College of Charleston. She has written extensively on African American literature and diasporic cultural studies and is the author of Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (2012), Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (2016), and co-editor of The Lemonade Reader (2019). In this conversation, we discuss the place of literary studies in the field of Black Studies, the relationship between folk cultural production and everyday Black life, and the reach of Black study inside and outside the academy.