Cassie Osei - Department of History, Bucknell 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 Cassie Osei, who teaches in the Department of History at Bucknell University, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Latin American Studies program. She works at the intersection of Latin American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Black Women’s History and her scholarship, teaching and public speaking span the fields of Brazilian studies, Afro-Latin America, Black women’s intellectual thought, Black diasporic feminisms, urban history, gender and sexuality studies, global labor history, and comparative race relations. She is currently completing a book manuscript examining the lives of paid Afro-Brazilian female household workers in the twentieth-century, who insisted on defining themselves as modern workers and dignified women, typically obscured by the loud legacies of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin America in discussions of Blackness, the importance of diaspora for Black Studies thinking, and the transformative meaning of multi-lingual research approaches. Osei's peer-reviewed work appears in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and Black Perspectives, whereas her public-facing work has been featured in Anglophone and Lusophone media outlets. She holds both a PhD and Masters in History from University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and a BA in History and Latin American Studies from the University of Kansas. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between the study of Blackness and Latin America, the politics and debates around notions of diaspora, and how a hemispherically expansive vision of Black Studies reorients and challenges the field.