This is Ashley Newby 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 Shingi Mavima, who teaches in the Department of History at University of Toledo. He is a specialist in the history and culture of Southern Africa, with particular focus on literature and popular culture. To this end, he has published on African hip hop, the relation of literature to questions of history and memory, and early nationalist literature in colonial Rhodesia. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies shapes the study of Africa, how the field facilitates trans-disciplinary and trans-geographic intellectual discussion, and generational shifts in the meaning of Black study.