Joy Keys chats with Author Shana L. Redmond about her book Everything Man

Shana L. Redmond is a native of Racine, Wisconsin and the daughter of working-class parents, whose experiences of service work and incarceration profoundly impacted her political and racial identity. It is from these experiences and knowledges that she approaches her scholarship and activist work, which are both concerned with laying bare and challenging the material conditions that encode and enforce difference and inequality. Labor, carceral regimes, and racial justice are some of her activist and scholarly interests. As a scholar, Redmond pulls from multiple subjects, strategies, and approaches in her work and situates her scholarship in and between fields including Black Studies, Performance Studies, History, Critical Ethnic Studies, Sound Studies, English and Literature, Cultural Studies, and (Ethno)Musicology. Her new book is an experimental cartography of the global polymath Paul Robeson and his repetition as vibration, hologram, and the built environment during and after his lifetime. Titled Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, the book forwards a theory of “antiphonal life” in order to announce his continuing influence and labors in the political life of artists, organizers, and intellectuals.