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 Qiana Whitted, who teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature and in the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. In addition to numerous articles on African American literature and graphic culture, she is the author of three books - ‘A God of Justice?’: The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature (2009), EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (2019), Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023) - and is the editor, with Brannon Costello, of Comics and the U.S. South (2012). In this conversation, we discuss the place of material culture in Black Studies, the meaning of graphic and comic book representation of Black life, and how an expanding sense of a Black Studies archive impacts the field.