Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus - Department of English, University of Southern California

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 Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. She has written extensively on African American literature and cultural studies and is the author of Afro-Realism and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel, published in 2020 and designated as honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. In this conversation, we discuss the place of literary studies in the Black Studies imagination, the relationship between cultural production and everyday Black life, and the politics of Black study inside and outside the academy.