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This is Ashley Newby 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 Kyle T. Mays, Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of urban history and studies, Afro-Indigenous Studies, and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018), An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (2021), and City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (2022). In this conversation, we discuss the cultural politics of Black Studies, the relation between expressive culture and place, and the intersection of blackness and nation. 

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