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 Rinaldo Walcott, who teaches in the Department of Africana and American Studies at University of Buffalo. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and public media articles, he has written Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada, Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies, Black Life: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom, and in 2021 he published both The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition. In this conversation, we explore the varied political meaning of Black Studies as a field of research and modality of struggle, the relation of politics to cultural and national studies, and the place of radical thinking in times of political crisis.