James Smethurst - Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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 James Smethurst, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Along with many essays on African American music, history, and culture, he is the author of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (2003), The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011), Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity (2020) and co-editor with Chris Green and Rachel Rubin of Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (2006) and co-editor with John Bracey and Sonia Sanchez of SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014). In this conversation, we discuss the politics of African American history, cultural studies, and the place of music in Black Studies methodology and in the work of Black study.