Today’s conversation is with Jarvis McInnis, who teaches in the Department of English at Duke University. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, he is author of Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, published by Columbia University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the rural Black south in Black Studies, the expansiveness of thinking and theorizing Black life, and how a Black Studies approach to archives and evidence broadens our notion of who does and what is intellectual work.