Régine Jean-Charles - Department of Africana Studies, Northeastern 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 Régine Jean-Charles, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Along with many essays on Black feminism, Haiti, and Caribbean literature, she is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014), Martin Luther King and the Trumpet of Conscience Today (2021), Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022). In this conversation, we discuss Caribbean literary studies, the experience and history of Haiti in a Black Studies frame, and the place of teaching and community work in our commitments to Black life.