Ra Malika Imhotep - Department of Global and Diaspora Studies, Spelman College

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 Ra Malika Imhotep, who is assistant professor of Global African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College. The central focus of their research is an application of Black feminist political economy to literal and figurative representations of transgressive Black femininities in folk cultures, aesthetic traditions, and resistance histories throughout the Global Black South. To that end, their forthcoming academic monograph explores these themes through the folkloric figure of the “tar baby.” They are also the author of the poetry collection gossypiin (2022), a co-convenor of The Church of Black feminist Thought ,and a member of The Black Aesthetic curatorial collective. Their writing has been featured in The Guggenheim Museum, The Academy of American Poets, Women & Performance, The Drama Review, Palimpsest, and several anthologies.  In this conversation, we discuss the complexity of intellectual work and cultural life, gender and blackness in a diasporic gram, and the place of creative work in Black Studies.