Biko Caruthers - Department of English, New York University

This is John Drabinski 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 Biko Caruthers, assistant professor and Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at New York University. His work engages with visual art, literature and history, and the theoretical and readerly possibilities of afropessimism. In this conversation, we explore the origins and political significance of Black Studies, the complex relationship between insurgent work in the field and the institutionalization of departments and professorial life, and how pessimist theory opens new horizons for reading historical texts and intervening in moments of cultural and political violence.