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 Khalil Saucier, who teaches in the Department of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Along with a number of scholarly articles and short pieces, he is the author of Necessarily Black: Cape Verdean Youth, Hip Hop Culture, and a Critique of Identity (2015), co-author of African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism (2024), and has done editorial work producing important volumes including most recently A Luta Continua: Reintroducing Amilcar Cabral to a New Generation of Thinkers (2016), Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation Theory (2016), and The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (2021). In this conversation, we discuss transnational study and the Black Studies imagination, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the transformation of disciplines when put in contact with Black Studies sensibilities.