The Black Rest Podcast

In this episode of The Black Rest Podcast, Dr. Deborah Willis, a visionary photographer, scholar, and director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture, joins Esther Armah, CEO of the Armah Institute of Emotional Justice to explore the radical, emotional, historical, and deeply personal meanings of Black rest. Together, they trace how a nation built on the backbreaking labor of enslaved Africans shaped Black people's relationship to rest, worth, guilt, and exhaustion. From Otis Redding’s quiet rebellion in “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” to photographs of Black domestic workers simply sitting, breathing, being, Willis redefines rest as an active, necessary space of healing. She shares her own struggles with rest, the guilt she carries, the labor she inherited, and the rare places where her body finally exhales—often 30,000 feet in the air. This episode asks: What does rest feel like in a Black body? Who creates rest for Black women? And how do we imagine a future where Black rest is not an interruption of labor—but a birthright?

On this episode of The Black Rest Podcast, host Dejha Carrington sits down with award-winning artist James Allister Sprang for a rich, sensory conversation about growing up Caribbean American in South Miami, discovering art as a place of calm, and learning to find rest through sound, breath, and presence. The heart of the episode explores Rest Within the Wake, Sprang’s immersive 48-minute musical work composed during a solo trip to an island off the coast of Belize. He talks about learning to scuba dive, discovering that underwater rest requires constant exhalation, and turning those breaths into tones, chords, and eventually an expansive somatic score meant to be experienced lying down, eyes closed, fully tuned inward.

In this episode of The Black Rest Podcast, host Dejha Carrington is joined by writer, scholar, poet, and Black feminist love-evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs for an ancestral and deeply restorative conversation. Together, they explore how water becomes a teacher, metaphor, and sanctuary for Black people across generations. Gumbs reflects on the lessons she learned from her grandfather in the ocean of Anguilla, the ways Black Caribbean cosmologies shape our understanding of rest, and how time bends when we are in a genuine relationship with our ancestors. Drawing from her book Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Gumbs expands on Lorde’s legacy of collective self-care as political warfare, and discusses what it means to create daily practices that reconnect us to infinite ancestral love. From weathering and liberation, to cosmic Black feminist science, and surrendering productivity in favor of presence, this episode offers a profound meditation on what it means to rest, to be held, and to live freedom as a repeating practice.