This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 Michelle M. Wright, who teaches in the Department of English at Emory University where she is Emory University College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English. Along with numerous scholarly articles, she is co-editor with Maria Fernandez and Faith Wilding of Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (2003), co-editor with Antje Schuhmann of Blackness and Sexualities (2007), and the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004), Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015). With Jodi Byrd, she is also co-editor of the book series "Critical Insurgencies" from Northwestern University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of nation in theorizing and practicing Black Studies, the role of critical theoretical inquiry in Black study, and the expansiveness of the very idea of blackness.