Nadia Alahmed - Department of Africana Studies, Dickinson University

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 Nadia Alahmed, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Dickinson College.Her research centers on the historical, political and cultural connections between Middle East and Black America. Her book Black Intifada: a Century of Black and Palestinian Solidarity is forthcoming in 2027 and she is at work on a second book tentatively titled Afro-Arabs and the Changing Discourse on Race and Ethnicity in Middle East and North Africa, which explores ethno-racial formations in the region. In this conversation, we discuss political and cultural history, the possibilities of Black-Arab solidarity, and the meaning of scholarship and activist practice in Black Studies.