The Black Studies Podcast

In the season finale of the Black Studies podcast, Gavin "Gavsborg" Blair and Isis Semaj-Hall join us to talk about dub aesthetics and the rhythms, sounds, and music that help them to find new forms of belonging with time, space, and each other.Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair is co-founder of Equiknoxx Music, a Kingston-based production and performance collective, with Bobby Blackbird. With roots in Reggae, Hip Hop, Jazz, Dancehall & Ska, the group operates across multiple genres while staying Jamaican to the core. Equiknoxx has released music for Aidonia, Busy Signal, Beenie Man, Ky-Mani Marley, Krayzie Bone, Masicka, J.O.E, Shanique Marie among others. While collaborating with Illum Sphere, Swing Ting, Mark Ernestus, Poirier, Arcade Fire and The Dirty Projectors among others, Equiknoxx continues to be revered for sharing new Jamaican expressions with the world and “making dancehall weird again” (Pitchfork magazine).   Dr. Isis Semaj-Hall is the Riddim Writer. She is a literary scholar, decolonial feminist, and cultural analyst with a creative practice that is nurtured by sound. As the Riddim Writer, she creates sound art and hosts the podcast “For Posterity” where she interviews Caribbean writers, musicians, visual artists, and inspiring citizens. As a Caribbean storytelling advocate, she has dubbed poetry and published non-fiction and fiction works. She is also co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine PREE: Caribbean Writing. With a commitment to opening-up access, her cultural analysis and critical scholarship have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, in non-academic outlets, and can be heard on the 2022 Carnegie Hall produced Afrofuturism podcast. She is currently completing her monograph “On the B-Side: Storytelling Meets Caribbean Futurism in Infinite Dub,” a critical exploration of word-sound-power, deep listening, environmental wisdom, and Caribbean identities. Dr. Semaj-Hall is the Caribbean literature and popular culture specialist in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Kingston, Jamaica. Episode Transcript

This week we are thrilled to be joined by Zélie Asava and Tambay A. Obenson to discuss cinemas of the Black diaspora. This conversation explores historically informed and forward-looking approaches to African film; the complexities of global Black communities; writing against the grain of histories and business models that revolve around Hollywood and American cinema; and much, much more!   Dr Zélie Asava is a specialist in questions of race, gender, screen studies, and visual culture. She is the author of The Black Irish Onscreen and Mixed Race Cinemas, and co-edited a Special Issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema on black and ethnic minority representation. She sits on the Boards of Screen Ireland, the Irish Film Institute, the journal French Screen Studies, Catalyst International Film Festival and the arts magazine Unapologetic, and is a member of the European Commission’s ‘Capital of Culture’ panel of experts.  With over 15 years of experience, Tambay A. Obenson has emerged as a trusted voice in African and diaspora cinema. He founded Shadow and Act in 2009, building what would become the leading online platform for Black film coverage with a global perspective, and spent four years at IndieWire as a Staff Writer. Currently, Tambay is building Akoroko, a new platform focused on mainstreaming coverage of and access to films telling African stories globally. Episode Transcript

This is the second part of a wonderfully rich, stimulating, and wide-ranging conversation between Grégory Pierrot and Anthony C. Alessandrini about the politics and poetics of translation, the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon, Black study, decolonial praxis, and much, much more!  Some of the books and films discussed in the second part of this fantastic conversation include: Joshua Myer’s On Black Study Jafar Panahi's No BearsIsaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask Ousmane Sembène’s Xala Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel’s Arna’s Children Episode transcript

This week we are joined by Anna Jane McIntyre and Angélique Willkie to discuss their playful, gentle, and assertive approaches to activism and art-making. Anna Jane McIntyre is a British-Trinidadian-now-Canadian multidisciplinary artist who explores Architectures of Being & Breathing through non-compartmentalised-think-light-movement-heavy art forms like printmaking, kinetic sculpture, installation, gifs, costume making, to-do lists, storytelling, story-setting, bushcraft, inaccurate portraiture & dodgy $5 entrepreneurial street sale experiments. Anna’s draft composition for the "We" mural at the Athletics and Recreation building, Queen's University, can be viewed on her website. A dance artivist, Angélique Willkie grounds herself in corporeal and decolonial dramaturgies. That work moves her through the structures of Concordia University. More information about Angélique’s solo performance, Confession Publique, can be found online, as can further details about her role as chair of the President's Task Force on Anti-Black Racism at Concordia.Songs selected by Angelique and Anna Jane have been added to the Black List, a playlist that compiles songs of sorrow and joy selected by guests on the Black Studies podcast. You can also find more bonus content inspired by our conversations with multidisciplinary artists, activists, curators, musicians, and scholars on Instagram (@blackstudiespodcast) and Linktree (https://linktr.ee/blackstudiespodcast) Episode transcript

In season two of the Black Studies Podcast, we assemble multidisciplinary artists, activists, curators, musicians, and scholars for creative and collaborative knowledge-making, building, and sharing. Our conversations with Anna Jane McIntyre, Angélique Willkie, Grégory Pierrot, Anthony C. Alessandrini, Zélie Asava, Tambay A. Obenson, Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair and Isis Semaj-Hall explore: • Artmaking and activism that is sensitive, playful, and assertive• Black Studies within and beyond the university  • The redemptive power of culture, and the deep lasting pleasures of Black popular culture• The overthrow of embedded colonial ideas• The music and cinema of the Black diaspora • And much more…Speakers featured in the trailer: Daniel McNeil, Angélique Willkie, Alanna Stuart, Grégory Pierrot, Jeden Tolentino, Zélie Asava, Toleen TouqMusic featured in the trailer: "Ren Riddim" by pyne

In this special, two-part episode of the Black Studies podcast, we are thrilled to be joined by David Austin and Bryan Mukandi! In the second part of their incredibly generous and generative conversation, David and Bryan discuss some of the music, books, ideas, conversations and friendships that stimulated and sustained them during the pandemic.David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution and editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness and You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal is the 2014 winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize. His writing engages the work of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Hannah Arendt, Walter Rodney, and Linton Kwesi Johnson in relation to politics, poetry and social movements. A former youth worker and community organizer, he has also produced radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon. He currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College and in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.Bryan Mukandi is an academic philosopher and health humanities researcher, with a background in the practice of medicine in a resource-poor, sub-Saharan African context. His work is directed towards understanding and addressing the social configurations that improve or worsen the well-being of those served least well by society. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Queensland in Australia, and one of his current research projects is Seeing the Black Child, which seeks to expand, reconfigure and present a more complex understanding of childhood than dominant conceptions of childhood in Australia that take the figure of the white child as paradigmatic.Transcript

In this special, two-part episode of the Black Studies podcast, we are thrilled to be joined by David Austin and Bryan Mukandi! In part one of their incredibly generous and generative conversation, David and Bryan discuss the revolutionary power of curiosity, intellectual humility and poet-philosophers of the dispossessed such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Zadie Smith, Bob Marley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and the Sons of Kemet.David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution and editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness and You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal is the 2014 winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize. His writing engages the work of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Hannah Arendt, Walter Rodney, and Linton Kwesi Johnson in relation to politics, poetry and social movements. A former youth worker and community organizer, he has also produced radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon. He currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College and in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.Bryan Mukandi is an academic philosopher and health humanities researcher, with a background in the practice of medicine in a resource-poor, sub-Saharan African context. His work is directed towards understanding and addressing the social configurations that improve or worsen the well-being of those served least well by society. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Queensland in Australia, and one of his current research projects is Seeing the Black Child, which seeks to expand, reconfigure and present a more complex understanding of childhood than dominant conceptions of childhood in Australia that take the figure of the white child as paradigmatic.Transcript

In our season one finale, we are thrilled to be joined by AbdouMaliq Simone and Armond Towns to discuss urban life, media philosophy, propaganda, freedom dreams, and much more!AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with abiding commitments to Muslim working classes, abolitionist ontologies, popular economies, and ensemble work with music. For decades he has traveled across the world working with various municipalities, research groups and social movements on issues of urban transformation. He is currently a Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town. His Key publications include, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities, and The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond CaptureArmond R. Towns is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. His work brings together Black studies, cultural studies, and media philosophy, and his book, On Black Media Philosophy, was published in 2022 by the University of California Press. Dr. Towns is also the cofounder and inaugural editor of the journal, Communication and Race, the newest journal of the National Communication Association (U.S.).Transcript