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 Willie Mack, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri. He has written widely in the history of transnational contact and political meaning between Haiti and the United States, carcerality and racial power, and is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Transnational Carceral Regimes and Punitive Anti-communism: Haitian Immigrants, Race, Empire, and Policing in New York City and Haiti, 1915-2000. In this conversation, we explore the place of Haiti in the Black Studies imagination, carceral studies and the politics of blackness, and the shift of the meaning of historical research inside a Black Studies sensibility.