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 Theodore A. Harris, a Philadelphia-based artist and writer. Along with numerous exhibits of his multi-media artwork linked via his website, he is the author of Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism, and co-author of two books with Amiri Baraka Our Flesh of Flames (Anvil Arts Press) and Malcolm X as Ideology (LeBow Books), a book with Fred Moten: i ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books); and TRIPTYCH: Text by Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (Caza de Poesía).In this conversation, we discuss the history of Black expressive culture, the importance of art for understanding Black life, and the meaning of creativity in politically fraught times.