Ousmane Power-Greene - Department of History, Clark 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 Ousmane Power-Greene, who teaches in the Department of History at Clark University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, he is the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (2014), the novel The Confessions of Matthew Strong (2022), and is currently completing a book-length study of Hubert Harrison, Black radical thought, and African American emigration movements. In this conversation, we discuss intellectual work and its impact on Black politics, the relationship between art and political life, and how creative work and historical writing intertwine in a Black Studies context.