Today’s conversation is with Logan Shanks, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Grounded in traditions of Black feminist theory and study, her work analyzes the afterlife of slavery in Black visual and sonic aesthetics in the South and how violence is made pleasurable in Black popular culture and performance in the Americas. In this conversation, we discuss diasporic sensibilities in study, popular culture as history and theory, and how vernacular life sits in the heart of the Black Studies tradition.