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 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and journalistic articles, she has written From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation in 2016, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership from 2019, and edited the immensely important collection How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective in 2017. She was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021. In this conversation, we explore the complex political meaning of Black Studies as a field of research and site of resistance, the relation of politics to intellectual inquiry in the past as well as contemporary moment, and the significance of radical thinking and writing in a time of political crisis.