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 Sam Tecle, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research engages with Black and diaspora studies, Urban studies, and sociology of education with particular focus on the analysis of diverse experiences, trajectories and expressions of Blackness grounded in particular histories of racialization, colonialism, community formation and resistance. In this conversation, we discuss the early formative history of Black Studies in Canada, the roots of Black study epistemologies in everyday practice, and the complexity of diverse stories of blackness for the Black Studies imagination.

Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2026) and At the Margins of Nihilism (2026). He is also the co-editor with Michael Sawyer of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and co-host of both The Black Studies Podcast and Conversations in Atlantic Theory.

In today’s conversation, we explore John Drabinski’s three latest monographs. In Atlantic Theory, he traces the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism while offering a comparative account of critical thought across the Atlantic world. In So Unimaginable a Price, he turns to James Baldwin, situating his work within a broader mid-century Atlantic context and placing it in dialogue with thinkers across the Caribbean and Africa.
Finally, in At the Margins of Nihilism, he develops a theoretical framework through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson, drawing on figures such as Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Baldwin to examine how different forms of nihilism operate as closed systems, and how they are unsettled through vernacular practices of life and refusal.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 Bryce Henson, a critical interpretive social scientist who specializes in Black diasporic cultural studies. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism with affiliations in Africana Studies and the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University. In 2016, he received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research with a Latin American & Caribbean Studies graduate minor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil examines how the Black hip-hop community in Salvador da Bahia constructs the quilombo (maroon) in urban contexts as a mode of fostering and protecting Black life. The book earned three awards from the National Communication Association and honorable mention for Best Book Prize from the Brazilian Studies Association. He is also a co-editor of the 2020 volume, Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization. Previously, he was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He now serves on the advisory board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).