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 Tamara J. Walker, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Her work explores race, travel, movement, and place in both Latin American history, which produced the book Exquisite Slaves: Race Clothing and Status in Colonial Lima (2017), and in stories of African American global travel in her recent book Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin American in the Black Studies imagination, the meaning of movement and travel for understanding Black life, and how inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches to Black life change historical writing.