Walidah Imarisha - Department of Black Studies, Portland State University

The Black Studies Podcast

This is Ashley Newby 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 Walidah Imarisha, Director of the Center for Black Studies and Associate Professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. She is the co-editor of two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. She is also the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She spent 6 years with the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project as a public scholar facilitating programs across the state about Oregon Black history and other topics. In 2015, she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing. In this conversation, we discuss the political meaning of Black Studies, the place of speculative thinking and fiction in the field, and the forms of time appropriate to the study of Black life, history, and expressive culture.