Grant Farred - Department of Africana Studies, Cornell 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 Grant Farred, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University. Along with numerous articles and edited collections, he is the author of over a dozen books, including most recently The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, The Comic Self, co-authored with Timothy Campbell, and Grievance: In Fragments. In this discussion, we explore the meaning of Black Studies pedagogy and writing, vernacular intellectual work, and the question of thinking as a compulsive and political practice.