Yveline Alexis - Department of Africana Studies, Oberlin 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 Yveline Alexis, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Oberlin College.She is an historian with interests in memory studies, oral histories, and archive work, with particular focus on the politics of Haitian resistance to occupation among intellectuals, artists, and religious figures. She is the author of a number of articles as well the book Haiti Fights Back: The Life & Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the urgency of multilingual research, the virtues of disorderly methods, and the expansive vision of historical work in Black Studies.