Melanie Holmes - Department of African American Studies, University of South Carolina

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 Melanie Holmes, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the meaning and significance of Black Power across geographies, in particular in the political and cultural space of the United States and Barbados. Her work on these issues can be found in a cluster of publications, including “Beautifully Black!: How Negro History Week and the Black History Movement Influenced Education in and Beyond the Black Power Era,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of African American History. In this conversation, we explore the complex history of resistance to antiblack racism, the relationship between Black study and education, and how historical research both grounds and expands the Black Studies imagination.