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 Christina Knight, who teaches in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. Christina received her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University. Her work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently at work on a manuscript, The Ship That is the Body: The Middle Passage in Time-Based Art, which investigates contemporary black American performing and visual arts that reimagine the history of the Atlantic slave trade. In this conversation, we discuss the place of expressive culture in Black Studies, how embodiment challenges conventions in scholarship, the profession, and in the classroom, and how time and physics recalibrate our understanding of blackness.

Our discussion refers to her short film doomsday : fieldnotes, which can viewed on YouTube.