Elena Guzman - Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Indiana University

This is John Drabinski 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 Elena Guzman, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. In addition to her critical writing and research in anthropology, which includes a book manuscript entitled Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean she is a filmmaker whose creative work explores “the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health.” In this conversation, we discuss the expansive possibilities of transdisciplinary thinking, the role of a Black Studies sensibility in anthropological research, and the place of creative work in the institutional life of Black Studies.