Paul Joseph López Oro - Program in Africana Studies, Bryn Mawr College

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 Paul Joseph López Oro, who teaches in and is the director of the Program in Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. His work focuses on the history, identity, and complex epistemologies of Black Latinx communities and cultures, with specific attention to Garifuna histories in the hemisphere, which is the focus of his forthcoming book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin America broadly and Central America in particular in the Black Studies imagination, the promise of thinking without imaginary and political borders, and the transformative work of Black queer studies in the history and future of the field.