Kimberly Thomas McNair - Department of African and African American Studies, Stanford 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 Kimberly Thomas McNair, who teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She teaches widely in literature, gender studies, and cultural studies inside the Black Studies tradition and is completing a book manuscript entitled Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: T-Shirt Culture and the Black Activist Tradition.In this conversation, we discuss the unique character of Black Studies, relations of disciplines to the non-disciplinary character of the field, and the intersection of politics, memory, and cultural studies in the history of Black social activism.