Episode 127: Is Sinners the Best Film of the 21st Century with Dr. Zandria Robinson

Today Dr. Zandria Robinson drops in to talk about Sinners and why it might be the best movie of the 21st century. We have a spoiler free introduction, a pause, and then a spoiler filled conversation about the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, WWI, Chicago, Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan, sex, music, and of course THAT SCENE. This conversation is almost as amazing as this film. Share it widely.

About our guest:

Dr. Zandria F. Robinson is a writer and ethnographer working on race, gender, sound, and spirit at the crossroads of the living and the dead. A native Memphian and classically-trained violinist, Robinson earned the Bachelor of Arts in Literature and African American Studies and the Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Memphis and the Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from Northwestern University. Dr. Robinson’s first book, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) won the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second monograph, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter (UCLA), won the 2018 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title and the Robert E. Park Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Robinson is currently at work on an ancestral memoir, Surely You'll Begin the World (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), a life-affirming exploration of grief, afterlife connections, and how deep listening to the stories of the dead can inform how we move through the world after experiencing loss. Her 2016 memoir essay, “Listening for the Country,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Essay.

Dr. Robinson’s teaching interests include Black feminist theory, Black popular culture, memoir, urban sociology, and Afro-futurism. She is Past President of the Association of Black Sociologists, a member of the editorial board of Southern Cultures, and a contributing editor at Oxford American. Her work has appeared in Issues in Race and Society, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the Annual Review of Sociology (with Marcus Anthony Hunter), Contexts, Rolling Stone, Scalawag, Hyperallergic, Believer, Oxford American, NPR, Glamour, MLK50.com and The New York Times Magazine.