Season 2: #5 - Lavelle Porter, The Blackademic Life

Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• Lavelle's recently published book The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual .
• Lavelle's favorite Black academic novels, including The Mad Man, Erasure, Glyph, I'm Not Sidney Poitier, and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People.  
• Lavelle's motivation for writing the book and his journey.
• Responses to the book related to the current political climate and the current moment in higher education.
• How Lavelle used his acknowlegements as a space to address the experience of writing while working at a teaching-intensive institution.
• Historical changes to the experiences of Black academics and experiences in historically Black colleges and universities vs. predominantly white institutions.
• The biggest challenges facing Black scholars today and the role of allies in improving working conditions.
• Hope for the future of higher ed in Black Lives Matter and student activism.

Resources Discussed in this Episode:

• Lavelle Porter
• The Blackademic LIfe: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual
• Black Perspectives
• CLAGS Center for LGBTQ studies
• Samuel Delaney's The Mad Man
• Percival Everett's Erasure, Glyph, and I'm Not Sidney Poitier
• Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
• Ishmael Reed's Japanese By Spring
• Kiese Laymon's Long Division
• Kristina Quynn's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Ed

Music Credits: “Come Right Here” by Tendinite, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY-NC-ND license.