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 Michele Reid-Vazquez, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College. Along with numerous scholarly articles, she is the author of The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World and is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Black Mobilities in the Age of Revolution: Politics, Migration, and Freedom in the Caribbean. She is also the host of the podcast Dialogues in Afrolatinidad, a series exploring the history and culture of black Latin America. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the hispanophone world in thinking the African diaspora, the varied notions and experiences of blackness that comprise Black Studies, and the complex relation between archival sources and the storytelling elements of writing history.