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 Kesewa John, who teaches in the Department of History at Goldsmiths University in London, England. Her scholarship addresses the complex intersections of diasporic identity, national belonging and non-belonging, and the emergence of England as a multiracial society. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of Black British identity, the relationship between race and diaspora in the Black British imagination, and the complex meaning of Black Studies in England in terms of its relation to existing fields of African and Caribbean studies.