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 Zalika U. Ibaorimi, who works under the artist name N0HumanInv0lved (N.H.I.) and teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. Her work engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes in order to trace the Human sexual geographies in the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Additionally, they consider the discursiveness of critical Humanism as a way to chart the figuration of the Black wh0re vis-à-vis the counter- and anti-Human. In this conversation, we discuss the work of undisciplining the field of Black studies, how critical theory and art practice converge to open new horizons in the field, and the significance of breaking with normative notions of taste in thinking about Black life.