Andrea J. Queeley - Departments of Anthropology and Africa and African Diaspora Studies, Florida International University

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 Andrea J. Queeley, who teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles in key journals and collections, she is the author of Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba (2015) and co-editor with Devyn Benson and Yesenia Fernández Selier of Gloria Rolando: Memory, Liberation, and the African Diaspora Through Cuban Film (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of Caribbean history and thinking for Black Studies, the place of cinematic work in knowledge production, and how anthropological methods expand the work of Black study.