Conversations in Atlantic Theory (Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy)

This discussion is with Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, a Professor of History at Howard University in Washington DC. She is a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history, her work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of demands of reparations for slavery and colonialism. She has a particular interest in the memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery. Her two recent single-authored books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (2020) and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017). She has been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project since 2017. She also serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review, the editorial board of the Journal of Slavery and Abolition, and the editorial review board of the African Studies Review. in this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Museums and Atlantic Slavery published by Routledge in 2021. Our conversation here examines how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Catriona MacLeod, a Senior lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. Her research interests concern women in French-language graphic novels (or bandes dessinées) and migration and trauma narratives in bandes dessinées and caricatures. She has published on these topics in a range of academic journals. In this conversation, we discuss her latest monograph on female representation in  bandes dessinées, entitled Invisible Presence: Drawing Women in French Comics. 

This discussion is with Dr. Mark W. Deets, an Assistant Professor of African and World History and the Director of the Center for American Studies and Research at The American University in Cairo. His research and teaching focus on 19 th and 20th century West African social and cultural history, especially in the Senegambian region. His first book, A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal, is published in 2023 with Ohio University Press. Dr.Deets has also published his work in The Journal of African History, History in Africa: A Journal of

Method, and the Africa Is A Country blog, among others. Dr. Deets serves as a book review editor for The Journal of West African History. He moved to Cairo in 2017 after obtaining his PhD in African history at Cornell University. He embarked on this academic career after 20

years as a helicopter pilot and a military diplomat in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a military attaché to the West African countries of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mauritania. In his final military assignment, Dr. Deets returned to his undergraduate alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, to teach History and to serve as the varsity wrestling officer representative. Dr. Deets grew up in the small town of Beloit, Kansas.

This discussion is with Dr. Nana Osei-Kofi,  (she/her) a Professor Emerita of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University. Her research centers on two primary lines of inquiry focused on justice and the politics of difference. One line examines structural shifts in higher education to promote equity and access, emphasizing curriculum transformation, change leadership, faculty recruitment, retention, and development. The second line explores the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe, with a focus on Sweden. In this conversation we discuss her most recent publication, AfroSwedish Places of Belonging, published by Northwestern University Press in 2024. In this work, she grapples with AfroSwedishness in relation to processes and experiences of racialization, imagination of self, and notions of belonging, agency, and kinship.

Conversations in Atlantic Theory is a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counter-narrative.

This discussion is with Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. He has published widely in popular and academic outlets on theology, political theory, and philosophy, with particular emphasis on politics and the history of Christian thought. Adam has authored ten books, including recent works The Prince of this World in 2016 and Neoliberalism’s Demons in 2018, both with Stanford University Press, and 2020’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory with Edinburgh University Press. His new book, which is our occasion for conversation today, is titled What is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life, published in late-2021 by Fordham University Press.

A discussion with Kyle Mays, who teaches in the Departments of History, African American Studies, and American Indian Studies at University of California-Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. He is the author of 2018’s Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America, published by State University of New York Press and a forthcoming book City of Dispossessions, an historical reflection on Black-Indigenous political and culture work in Detroit, Michigan. He is also the author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, published in late-2021 by Beacon Press, which is our topic of discussion in this podcast. We cover issues of comparative study, the complex mix of conflict and complement in the hyphen in "Afro-Indigenous," the past of solidarity in struggle, and the future of the same.

A discussion with Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She teaches and publishes widely in African-American literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on post-Antebellum literature up to the Harlem Renaissance. Her 2020 book Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel, published by Louisiana State University Press and awarded Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for work on African American literature and culture in 2022, is the occasion for our conversation today. This book revisits discourses of race and cultural production in the works of Francis Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Charles Chestnutt. In this conversation, we explore the interracial lines of influence and African American literariness, with special attention to how such literariness marks this early period of writing with a peculiar mix of critique, vision of the future, and the distinctiveness of racial formation in key literary works and then-emerging writerly traditions. She is currently at work on a book-length study of Andrea Lee's fiction, a broad take on which is in a forthcoming essay in The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth Century American Literature.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Emily Marker, she is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research and teaching interests are in imperial and postcolonial Europe, francophone Africa, race, religion, youth, and global history. Her work has been published in The American Historical Review, French Politics, Culture & Society, and Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge. She has also co-edited, with Dr. Christy Pichichero, a three-part series of special issues on race and racism in France and the Francophone world today in H-France Salon. In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Marker works on initiatives for social justice and equity in the academy. A co-founder of the Race and Pedagogy Working Group at the University of Chicago, she organizes workshops, facilitations, and community classes on power, privilege, and inclusive teaching. She is a member of the Graduate Faculty in History at Rutgers-New Brunswick and Rutgers’ Center for African Studies, and former member of the Governing Council of the Western Society for French History (WSFH). She currently chairs the Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize Committee and the WSFH engagé.e.s program. In this conversation, we discuss the entangled history of European integration and African decolonization and the inclusion of the postwar empire in the construction of Europe during the postwar era through the lens of youth and education initiatives.  

This discussion is with Professor Jenny Shaw, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama where she teaches classes in the histories of the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, Comparative Slavery & Emancipation, and Early Modern Black Britain. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and she has published in Past & Present, The William & Mary Quarterly, and Slavery & Abolition. In this conversation we discuss her latest monograph, The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. We discuss the transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. 

This discussion is with Dr. Jacqueline Couti, she is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French Studies at Rice university. Her research and teaching interests delve into the transatlantic and transnational interconnections between cultural productions from continental France and its now former colonies. A central theme of her research is how local knowledge in the colonial and post-colonial eras has shaped the literatures, and the cultural awareness of the self, in former French colonies through specific representations of sexuality. She is the author of Dangerous Creole Liaisons (2016) and “Lumina Sophie, Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” in Women Claiming Freedom: Gender, Race, and Liberty in the Americas. In this conversation, we discuss Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924-1948 published by Liverpool University Press in 2021. Our conversation here focuses on key concepts and arguments in the book where she puts Metropolitan France and the French Caribbean in dialogue exploring constructions of gender, race, sexuality, identity politics, and nationalism. 

This conversation is with Habiba Ibrahim, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. In addition to a number of published articles on African American literature and cultural studies, Ibrahim co-edited with Badia Ahad a 2022 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly organized around the theme “Black Temporality in Times of Crisis.” She is the author of two books: 2012’s Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiculturalism, published by University of Minnesota Press and Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life, published in 2021 by New York University Press and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the complexity of time and the body in Black life and literary culture, the oceanic and memory, humanism and what comes next, and the meaning of Black childhood in an antiblack world and its history. The cover art discussed in the podcast is "Little Swimmer" (2016), a painting by Calida Garcia Rowles (https://calidarawles.com)

Jasmine Nichole Cobb is Professor of African & African American Studies and of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, as well as a co-director of the “From Slavery to Freedom” (FS2F) Franklin Humanities Lab. A scholar of black cultural production and visual representation, Cobb is the author of two monographs, Picture Freedom:  Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (NYUP 2015) and New Growth:  The Art and Texture of Black Hair (Duke UP 2022). She is the editor for African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830 (Cambridge UP 2021) and she has written essays for Public Culture, MELUS:  Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and American Literary History. In this conversation, we discuss her latest monograph, New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.

This discussion is with Dr. Sarah J. Zimmerman, an Associate Professor of history at Western Washington University and is the Vice President of the French Colonial Historical Society. Her research focuses on women and gender in West Africa, French Empire, and the Atlantic World. Her current research attends to the gendered production of history and memory on Gorée Island--a UNESCO World Heritage site in Senegal. She has published articles in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and Les Temps Modernes. In this conversation, we discuss her first monograph,  Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire was published in 2020 by Ohio University Press. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book where she historicizes militarization, marriage, and colonialism by focusing on tirailleurs sénégalais households in West Africa and across French Empire.

A conversation with Lindsey Stewart, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis where she writes and publishes on issues of politics, race, sex, and gender in the African American philosophical tradition. She is the author of the book The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, published in late-2021 by Northwestern University Press and which we discuss in this episode. We cover questions of Hurston as philosopher, the place of Black joy in theorizing Black life in an anti-Black world, and how The Politics of Black Joy opens up new horizons of philosophical thinking and the African American intellectual tradition.

A discussion with Aram Goudsouzian, Professor of History at University of Memphis, and Charles McKinney, Professor of Africana Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. McKinney is the author of numerous essays on African American history and the book Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, published in 2010, and is currently at work on a book titled Losing the Party of Lincoln: George Washington Lee and the Struggle for the Soul of the Republican Party, which explores the life and work of George Washington Lee, an African American Republican operative and civil rights activist who lived in Memphis in the middle of the twentieth century. Goudsouzian is the author of five books, including most recently Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, published in 2014, and 2019’s The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America.

Together, Goudsouzian and McKinney edited the 2018 collection An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, published by University of Kentucky Press, which we discuss in this episode. 

This discussion is with Mari Crabtree, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.  Mari has published on African American history and culture, with particular emphasis on trauma, the history of lynching, and critical aspects of African American humor. Along with a number of articles, she recently published My Soul is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, out with Yale University Press in late-2022 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the project, conceptions of trauma the book both adopts and modifies, the meaning of memory in African American culture and history, the blues as readerly sensibility, and Crabtree’s productive method of reading absences and silences.

A conversation with Geo Maher about his forthcoming book Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance, which explores the history and political character of revolutionary action and its continuity with racial justice struggle in the contemporary moment.

Geo Maher teaches in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. He is the author of numerous articles in academic venues, as well as popular and radical political media. He has written five books: ‘We Created Chavez’: A People’s History of the Bolivarian Revolution and Decolonizing Dialectics, both with Duke University Press, and with Verso he has published Building the Commune and A World Without Police. Anticolonial Eruptions is forthcoming with University of California Press in late-March 2022.

This discussion is with Dr. Julia Hauser, a cultural historian interested in the entanglements of Europe, the US and Asia, mainly India and the Middle East, during the nineteenth and twentieth century. She has worked on female mission in late Ottoman Beirut, the entangled history of vegetarianism between Europe, the US, and India, and the global history of the plague. Her publications include German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut published by Leiden: Brill in 2015, and The Moral Contagion, a global history of the plague illustrated by artist Sarnath Banerjee, published by Delhi Harper Collins in 2024. In this conversation, we discuss her monograph, A Taste for Purity published by Columbia University Press in 2024 where she argues that vegetarianism during the mid-nineteenth century to the early Cold War, was motivated by expansive visions of moral, physical, and even racial purification.

This discussion is with Dr. Brian Valente-Quinn, he is an associate professor of Francophone African Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the histories and politics of theatrical performance in West Africa, and especially the stage’s interplay with questions of decoloniality, Pan-Africanism, popular culture, and forms of activist performance. In this discussion we discuss his book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, where he employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the reworkings and innovations of stage spaces and performance practices in Senegal from the colonial era to the present day. 

John Drabinski hosts this conversation with Perry Zurn, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. In addition to dozens of articles on key figures and issues in the European philosophical tradition, Perry has edited three volumes: with Andrew Dilts, Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, published by Palgrave in 2016; with Arjun Shankar, Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, with University of Minnesota Press in 2020; and Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980, which included translation work and was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021. He has co-authored Curious Minds: The Power of Connection with Dani S. Bassett, published by MIT Press in 2022 and single authored Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the intellectual roots of the project, the relation between curiosity, self-making, and politics, as well as the place of curiosity in thinking about the future of philosophy and politics.

This discussion is with Dr. Elodie Silberstein (she/her), an artist and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Pace University (New York City, United States). She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University (Naarm/Melbourne, Australia), and a Master of Fine Arts from the University Paul-Valery (Montpellier, France). Her research focuses on the representations of femininity in the visual landscape – from fine art to mass media – as a prism through which to map issues of social justice in a globalized world. She investigates the way these depictions have reflected social, racial, and environmental inequalities at a geopolitical level. Her first monograph examines the evolution of the depictions of black femininity in French visual culture. Drawing on a broad spectrum of archives extending back to the late 18th century – paintings, fashion plates, prints, photographs, and films – Animality and Humanity in French Late Modern Representations of Black Femininity (Routledge) traces the ways a patriarchal imperialism and a global capitalism have paired black women with the realm of nature to justify the exploitation both of people and of ecosystems.

When not scouring flea markets for historical material, Elodie chairs panel discussions and writes for the media on subjects ranging from the portrayal of young femininity in the 19th century European postcard industry to the politics of black femininity in the Barbie Fashionistas. She completed a four-year membership of the Darebin Women’s Advisory Committee which provides guidance to the City of Darebin (Naarm/Melbourne) on gender policies.

This discussion is with Dr. Gosine, a Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto. His publications include co-authorship of the text Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada and contributions to many journals including Small Axe, Wasafiri, Sexualities, Topia, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Art in America, as well as scholarly anthologies. His artwork has been exhibited internationally at various galleries and museums and he most recently curated the critically acclaimed exhibition "everything slackens in a wreck" at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York. His newest book, Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, was recently published by Duke University Press.

We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Tina Post, an Assistant Professor of English and Theater and Performance at the University of Chicago. Her recent first monograph, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, is the first book in NYU Press’s new Minoritarian Aesthetics series. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Modern Drama, TDR: The Drama Review, International Review of African American Art (IRAAA), ASAP/Journal, and the edited collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke University Press, 2020). Dr.Post’s creative work can be found in Imagined Theaters, Stone Canoe, and The Appendix. In today’s discussion, we discuss Deadpan, where Dr.Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. 

A lengthy conversation with Jeanne-Marie Jackson about her new book and its creative staging of dialogue between fiction and philosophy, with particular emphasis on how that dialogue happens within the texts of contemporary anglophone African writers.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a literary critic and scholar of world literature who teaches in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. She has published extensively on African literature, philosophy, and politics in both scholarly and popular venues. Her first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, is a compelling comparative study, creating intellectual space within which it is possible to connect the motifs and imperatives of 19th century Russian realist literature to the literature of South Africa in the apartheid era and postcolonial moment. Her new book, which is under discussion in the conversation, was published in early 2021 with Princeton University Press and is titled The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing.

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Drew Dalton, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Dominican University in Chicago, Illinois where he currently serves as chair of the department. He is the author of numerous articles in European philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and phenomenology, as well as three authored books: Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire, published in 2009 by Duquesne University Press, The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute with Bloomsbury in 2018, and the just out book The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Reason to Ethical Pessimism with Northwestern University Press, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the relationship between material science and metaphysics, the relation between metaphysics and ethical sensibility, as well as the place of pessimism in our ethical, existential, and political thinking. A link to the online essay mentioned at the close of the podcast is here: "The Beautiful Pessimism of Jimmy Buffett" in The Conversation.

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today's discussion is with Dr. Kathleen Spanos and Sinclair Emoghene. In this conversation, Sinclair and Dr. Spanos present a framework for dance practitioners and researchers working in diverse dance cultures to navigate academia and the professional dance field. The framework is based on the idea of “cultural confluences,” conjuring up an image of bodies of water meeting and flowing into and past one another, migrating through what they refer to as the mainstream and non-mainstream. Through an analysis of language, aesthetic values, spaces, creative processes, and archival research practices, the book offers a collaborative model for communicating the value that marginalized dance communities bring to the field.

Learn more at www.danceconfluences.com and follow them on Instagram @danceconfluences. 

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Robin Brooks,  an associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with an impressive record of scholarship that examines a range of cultural matters concerning Black communities in the United States and the wider African Diaspora. Primary research and teaching interests for Dr. Brooks include contemporary cultural and literary studies as well as working-class studies, Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, higher education management, and education policy. Her research is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been featured in several news media outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and she has delivered countless presentations on her work at national and international conferences. Her interdisciplinary work appeals to various audiences and is solution-oriented in order to contribute to dismantling racial and related hierarchies. Challenging conventional boundaries, her scholarship uncovers overlooked and underexamined ways in which African Diasporic cultural representations participate in antiracist and anti-discriminatory struggles. In this conversation we discuss her book Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (UNC Press, 2022), which is a book that examines how contemporary writers use literary portrayals of class to critique inequalities and divisions in the U.S. and Caribbean. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida and an MA in Afro American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Nicholas Harrison, he is a Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at King’s College London. During his

student years he worked as a teacher at the university of Tunis, at a school in rural Quebec, and at the ENS in Paris. He returned to the UK to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1992. There he began work on francophone literature of the Maghreb, and went on to become the first person to teach that material at Cambridge and then at University College London. His research interests are quite diverse, stretching across film, translation studies, and comparative literature, but one of his recurring concerns has been the sort of political work that literary texts – and also films – are understood to do, or imagined to do, by writers, censors, critics, and teachers. His first book, Circles of Censorship, appeared in 1995; his second, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction, in 2003, and his third, which we will discuss today is titled Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education – which is now available on open access – in 2019.

A discussion with Julius Fleming, Jr., who teaches in the Department of English at University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He has published widely on African American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on how cultural production functions at the very heart of political movement, mobilization, and demands. In this conversation, we discuss his new book Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, which was published in late-March 2022 by New York University Press. Our conversation focuses here on its key arguments about the place of theater in the Civil Rights Movement and the long project of Black freedom struggle.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Darieck Scott, a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  His book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), was the winner of the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies of the Modern Language Association. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex ( published in 2007) and Traitor to the Race (published in 1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (published in 2004). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom in This Village (2005), Black Like Us (2002), Giant Steps (2000), Shade (1996) and Ancestral House (1995), as well as in the erotica collections Flesh and the Word 4 (1997) and Inside Him (2006). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, The Americas Review, and American Literary History, and is co-editor with Ramzi Fawaz of the American Literature special issue, “Queer About Comics,” winner of the 2018 Best Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He is also the author of Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, published by NYU Press in 2022, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.

A discussion with Mark Christian Thompson, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of five books: Black Fascisms, published in 2007 by University of Virginia Press; Kafka’s Blues, out with Northwestern University Press in 2016; 2018’s Anti-Music: Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought Between the Wars, published by SUNY Press; Phenomenal Blackness, our occasion for discussion today, which appeared in late 2021 with University of Chicago Press and the forthcoming Critique of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Philosophy. In this conversation, we explore the influence of key figures in German critical theory on post-WWII African American writers and political intellectuals.

A conversation with Kris Sealey about her 2020 book Creolizing the Nation, which addresses the cultural, political, and historical significance of creolization for thinking about the lived-experience of migration, movement, culture mixing, and cultural production in the Americas.

Kris Sealey teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. She has published widely in European philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophical questions arising from racialized experience in the Americas, and anti- and de-colonial theory in the black Atlantic. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence was published in 2013 by State University of New York Press, and her second book, which is the topic of this conversation, was published in 2020 by Northwestern University Press and is titled Creolizing the Nation.

The opening poem "Nothing to Declare," read by Kris Sealey, was written Lauren K. Alleyne. Many thanks to the poet for permission to include this reading of her gorgeous, evocative poem.

This conversation is with Margret Grebowicz and Kiff Bamford, editors of a new collection of essays entitled Lyotard and Critical Practice, published in late-2022 by Bloomsbury. Margret teaches political theory at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the author of a number of scholarly and popular media pieces, ranging from French critical theory to reflections on mountain climbing and the social-cultural meaning of dogs in contemporary life. Margret is the author of six books: Why Internet Porn Matters (2013), Beyond the Cyborg (co-authored with Helen Merrick in 2015), The National Park to Come (2015), Whale Song (2017), Mountains and Desire (2020), and Rescue Me: Dogs and Their Humans (2021). Kiff is a Reader in Contemporary Art at Leeds Beckett University in England. He is the author of Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing (2012) and Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (2017), as well as the editor of Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of Lyotard’s legacy, the place of the postmodern in contemporary theory, and the tasks and labor of editing a collection on a critical yet all-but-forgotten late-twentieth century thinker.

This discussion is with Dr. Étienne Achille and Dr. Oana Panaïté. Dr. Achille is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Villanova University. His publications include the monograph Mythologies postcoloniales. Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (2018, co-authored with L. Moudileno;) and the volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020, co-edited with C. Forsdick and L. Moudileno). Dr. Panaïté is a Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (2012), The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (2017), and Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory (2022). In this conversation, we discuss their monograph, Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature where they analyze the works of contemporary French novelists and explore the white literary gaze in a contemporary French context. 

This discussion is with four contributors to a new edited collection titled The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives, published in late-2021 by Oxford University Press. We’re joined by Alex Madva, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, where he also directs the California Center for Ethics and Policy. Along with Brandon Hogan, Michael Cholbi, and Benjamin Yost, he co-edited this collection and is the co-author with Cholbi of the included piece “Can Capital Punishment Survive Black Lives Matter”? Vanessa Wills, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and authored the essay “‘He Ate Jim Crow’: Racist Ideology as False Consciousness,” which takes up Karl Marx’s treatment of ideology as a way to understand the persistence of antiblack racism. Ian Olasov, a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, who authored an essay in the volume on philosophy, language, and how we talk about Black liberation, titled “The Movement for Black Lives and the Language of Liberation.” And Dana Miranda, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts at Boston, the author of “The Violence of Leadership in Black Lives Matter,” which examines the relationship between movement aims and the distinction between leadership and mobilizations that are leaderful.

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today's discussion is with with Professor Jason Allen-Paisant, a Jamaican writer, multi-award-winning poet, Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. In this conversation, we discuss his monograph Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, published by Oxford University Press in May 2024. In this conversation, Professor Allen-Paisant explores how Césaire's work articulates for him a way in which poetry eliminates borders between the self and the external world and introduces what he calls, ‘pedagogies of participation’, ‘pedagogies of thinking with spirits’ to allow for the embrace and co-existence of multiple truths and ways of living and being.  

This is Fatima Seck and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and French at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of books on the history of logic, comparative philosophy, and the legacy of life philosophy in the francophone African tradition. In this conversation, we discuss his new book Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, which examines the place of reason and rationality in the Islamic philosophical practices in Western Africa from the medieval period forward.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Marlene Daut , she is a Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University and author of the recently published book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. She is series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press, co-editor of Global Black History at Public Books, and has been a featured writer in various magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, and The Conversation, among others. In this conversation, Dr. Daut argues that discourse around freedom and equality should be linked to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized, an idea propagated by Haitians. She sheds lights on not-so known 18th and 19th century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers and their contribution to the Haitian Revolution. 

A discussion with Deva Woodly, who teaches in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where she also directs the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence. Deva has published widely on democratic theory and practice, focusing on the function of public meaning formation and its effect on self- and collective-understanding of the polity, employing multiple methods to understand the power of discourse in shaping democratic life. She is the author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance, published in 2015 by Oxford University Press, as well as Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, also published by Oxford University Press in late-2021 and is the occasion for our conversation today. This podcast explores the origins of the project, the role of social movements in democratic life, the location of knowledge production in conversation and discussion, the future of Black liberation struggle, and the critical function of radical Black feminist pragmatism in thinking through our moment. Cover art by Kei Williams, which gets some discussion in this conversation.

This discussion is with Professor Christopher Freeburg, Dr. Freeburg is the John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Dr. Freeburg is an award-winning author of three scholarly books and numerous articles including, Melville in the Idea of Blackness (Cambridge UP, 2012), Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death (Duke University Press, 2021).  His book in-progress, Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life is this culmination of my life’s worth of teaching African American history and culture from the church to hip hop, from slavery to the present. Dr. Freeburg has won numerous academic awards, fellowships, and titles, most recently, University Scholar, Center for Advanced Study Associate (University of Illinois, 2019-2020), University Scholar (2019-) and Conrad Humanities Scholar (2015-2020), as well as the Hennig Cohen Prize, from The Melville Society, 2012. In this discussion, we discuss his book Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death where he examines slavery texts and media to show how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom.

This discussion is with Dr. Felisa Vergara Reynold, an Associate Professor of French for the Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Her focus is on literature in French from the Antilles, West Africa, and North Africa. She primarily works on the legacy and impact of colonialism on literature in French, from the former colonies, and is particularly concerned with the continued influence of colonialism in the post-colonial era, and how it is represented in cultural production. In this discussion, we discuss her book The Author as Cannibal: Re-Writing in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre (1969-1995) where Dr. Reynolds presents textual revisions of Francophone authors as figurative acts of cannibalism and examines how these literary cannibalizations critique colonialism and its legacy in each author’s homeland.

This discussion is with Shanna Greene Benjamin, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She has published widely on African American literary and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on Black women’s literature and intellectual history. Along with numerous articles, she recently published Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay, out with University of North Carolina Press in 2021. The book was awarded honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association in 2022, and it is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the project, the mixed-genre presentation of McKay’s life, the organizing principles behind the book’s reckoning with archival materials, and the importance of placing Nellie Y. McKay at the heart of African American literary and cultural production.

This discussion is with Dr. Bryan Sinche, a Professor and Chair of English at the University of Hartford. He has written more than twenty essays and reviews which appear in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review, ESQ, Legacy, and Biography and in collections published by Basic Books, Cambridge University Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press. He is also the editor of two books: The Guide for Teachers accompanying the third edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014) and the first scholarly edition of Appointed: An American Novel (2019, co-edited with Eric Gardner).

In this conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, Published by the Author: Self-Publication and Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024, where he discusses the hidden history of African American self-publication and offers new ways to understand the significance of publication as a creative, reformist, and remunerative project. 

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Jennifer Nesbitt, professor of English at the York campus of The Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches everything from first-year composition to upper-division courses in women’s writing and Caribbean culture. She is the author of two books: Narrative Settlements: Genre and Geography in British Women’s Fiction, 1918-1939,  from the University of Toronto Press in 2005, a survey of place, nation, and gender as women writers responded to enfranchisement in the wake of World War I.  As she was completing that project, the idea for her second book, Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture, emerged from classroom experiences and burgeoned into a cross-cultural examination of the presence of rum as a marker for the transformation (or not) of colonial ideologies and subjects in the decolonial and postcolonial period. In addition to this work, she has held the position of editor of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 since 2020 and is active in the Feminist inter/Modernist Studies Association. From 2013-2016, Dr. Nesbitt enjoyed working with popular media and community groups to discuss the PBS television series Downton Abbey; she has published two essays about, respectively, gender and race in that series. Her work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, ARIEL, Clues: The Journal of Detective Fiction, Film & History, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others.  Currently she is working on a digital cluster on whiteness and modernist studies and she continues to explore the role of rum in late-twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

 
We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

This discussion is with Dr. Lindsey B. Green-Simms, a Professor of Literature at American University, Washington D.C. where she teaches classes on film and fiction from Africa and the global South. In this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Queer African Cinemas, published by Duke University Press in March 2022. Our conversation here examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the 21st century. 

This discussion is with Richard Price, an anthropologist and historian who has written extensively on the history and culture of African Americans throughout the hemisphere. He has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and William & Mary, and in France, the Netherlands, and Brazil. His prize-winning books, translated into several languages, include First-Time, Alabi’s World, The Convict and the Colonel, Travels with Tooy, and Rainforest Warriors and most recently with Sally Price, Saamaka Dreaming and Maroons in Guyane. In this conversation, we discuss Maroons in Guyane: Past, Present, Future published by University of Georgia Press in 2022. His forthcoming memoir, Inside/Outside, will be published in October 2022. Our conversation here focuses on the history of Maroon peoples in Guyane, how these groups differ from one another, and their current situations.  

A conversation with Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He writes and publishes widely in cultural criticism, with particular focus on the cultural production and African American musical history of soul and rhythm and blues music. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, published in 2013 by New York University Press, and the 2015 publication of the tenth anniversary edition of his classic text New Black Man with Routledge. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between African American music, mourning, cultural politics, and mobilization in the digital age after our analogue moment. His book Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, the occasion for our conversation today, was published by New York University Press in early-March 2022.

A conversation with Alvin Henry, who teaches in the Department of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he writes on African American literature and literary theory. He is the author of the 2020 book Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel, published by University of Minnesota Press and which we discuss in this podcast. The conversation explores how the frame of queer flesh, entangled with the question of blackness, changes how we read key aspects of African American literature - in particular, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. As well, we explore the implications of these re-readings for theorizing subjectivity and how the frame of Black queer flesh exposes our habitual appeal to the very forms of subjectivity that condition and sustain anti-blackness.

This discussion is with Dr. Imani D. Owens, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.  She studies and teaches African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies at Princeton University, a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and small axe salon. She is currently a faculty fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. In this conversation we discuss her book Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia University Press: Black Lives in the Diaspora series) where she charts the connection between literary form and anti-imperialist politics in Caribbean and African American texts during the interwar period. 

John E. Drabinski hosts a conversation with Stefanie Dunning, Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The author of numerous essays on African American literature and culture, Stefanie has authored two books: Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture, published by Indiana University Press in 2009 and Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, published by University of Mississippi Press in 2021 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the book, the importance of nature and plant life in thinking about African American literature and cultural production, and the complexities of afropessimism for theorizing the end of the world, the terms of beginning again, and the possibilities for imagining a different future.

A discussion with Irvin Hunt, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. He writes on African American literature and political history with special emphasis on art, world-making, and their temporalities in the context of a racially fraught society. Our conversation is about his new book Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, forthcoming in early April 2022 with University of North Carolina Press. Topics include what it means to write and think theoretically about activist figures, to embed theoretical figures in social and political history, and the stakes of thinking about Black life as in the present and not inextricably, irretrievably tied to the abject past nor to a future of hope.

Today’s discussion with Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez, who teaches in the Department of English at Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan. She publishes widely in Afro-Atlantic studies with particular emphasis on hispanophone Africa and Americas, as well as co-curating with Jessica Marie Johnson the digital project-collective Electric Marronage. We are discussing today her book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, which was published in late 2020 by Northwestern University Press and was the winner of the MLA prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies.

You can read about her current projects at her personal website (http://www.yomairafigueroa.com), as well as ongoing curatorial work at the website for Electric Marronage. To view the Knowledge Unlatched (open access) edition of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, visit https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/49666.

A conversation with Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, editors of Intolerable, the new collection of speeches, pamphlets, essays, and manifestos by the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prisons Information Group), published by University of Minnesota Press in late 2021. Discussion ranges from the origins of the project to the history of GIP and the legacy it leaves in post-WWII French thought to contemporary and transnational resonance of its themes.

Kevin Thompson teaches in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, where he publishes widely in 19th and 20th century European thought and is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Normativity (Northwestern 2019). Perry Zurn teaches in the Department of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. and has written extensively on themes of curiosity, prison abolition, Foucault’s critical theory, and is the author of the book Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (Minnesota 2021).

This conversation is with Rinaldo Walcott, who teaches in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto, where he is the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (1997), Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (2000), Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies (2016) - all with Insomniac Press), On Property (2021) with Biblioasis, and most recently The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom, published with Duke University Press and the occasion for our conversation today. In our conversation here, we explore the relationship between emancipation and freedom, the enigma of time in Black freedom struggle, music and meaning, expression and mobilization, and the complexity of pessimism in our long-age of antiblack violence. Cover art, discussed at the beginning of the podcast, is "A Single Section: The Journey #2" (2016) by Torkwase Dyson.

A discussion with Martin Shuster, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland where he also directs the Center for Geographies of Justice. He is the author of numerous articles in European and Jewish philosophy, cultural studies, and phenomenology, as well as three authored books: 2014’s Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity, published by University of Chicago Press; New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, published in 2017 by University of Chicago Press; and the book we are discussing in this episode, How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism, out with Indiana University Press in late 2021. This conversation covers issues of Judaism's complex composition as a philosophical position, the scope of phenomenology as a method of reading, possibilities for thinking catastrophe in a comparative context, and the meaning of world and worldhood, awe and outrage, in a broken world.

This discussion is with Kaiama L. Glover, she is an Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College at Columbia University. She has written extensively about Caribbean literature in works such as Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010), and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of prose fiction and non-fiction. She has also been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the co-host of WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. Her current project, an intellectual biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life," has been supported by fellowships at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the New York Public Library Cullman Center.  In this conversation, we discuss A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being published by Duke University Press in 2021. Our conversation here focuses on championing unruly female protagonists in selected Caribbean literary works and expanding modes of theorization. 

This discussion is with Professor Sandra Gunning, Dr. Gunning is a literary scholar working jointly in the Department of American Culture, and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently she’s at work on an alternate Black literary history of the American Civil War. In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Gunning’s Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic where she examines 19th century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. 

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Afro American Studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C.  In addition to a number articles in scholarly journals and popular intellectual venues, he has written three books: We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989, published with New York University Press in 2019, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, published with Polity Press in 2021, and the book that occasions our conversation today: Of Black Study, published with Pluto Press in 2023.

This discussion is with Adrienne Cohen, an Assistant Professor of cultural anthropology at Colorado State University. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea, West Africa on urban dance and political change, and in the United States among migrant artists from Guinea. Cohen is the author of Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, African Studies Review, and Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute. 

This discussion is with Dr. Muriam Haleh Davis, Dr. Davis teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the author of Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke University Press, 2022). Her research studies the relationship between decolonization and the history of the social sciences. She is a frequent commentator of Algerian and French politics and her writings and interviews have been featured on NPR, France24, Al-Jazeera English, Jadaliyya, Truthout, and Public Books. 

A discussion is with Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White, editors of a new collection titled Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution, out with Bloomsbury Publishing in late-2021. Kir teaches in the Department of English at State University of New York at Albany in Albany, New York, and is the author of numerous articles and the book Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism, published by Fordham University Press, 2014. Deborah teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she has written widely on 19th and 20th century literature and thought, and is the author of Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History, published by Stanford University Press in 2000. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world’s literary imagination, the long shadow and persistence of romanticism, and the enduring significance of Haitian history and thought for thinking through issues of race, nation, revolution, literature, and conceptions of the new.

This discussion is with Dr. Isaac Joslin who holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Francophone Studies. Currently Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies and Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University, he has travelled extensively for research in Francophone Africa in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Burundi. His research interests include Postcolonial Francophone African literatures and cinemas, aesthetics and theories of representation, theories of cultural hybridity, ecocriticism, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, as well as pedagogical approaches for teaching African literatures and cultures. He has published scholarly articles on African literature and culture in the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, African Literature Today, The French Review, Critical African Studies, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Oeuvres et Critiques, and others. His first monograph from Ohio University Press (April 2023) is entitled, Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad, she is the author of Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017). She is the Visiting Professor of Buddhism and Black Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she teaches classes on Buddhism and social justice. She formerly taught classes in philosophy and social theory, and directed the Peace and Justice Studies program, at Warren Wilson College. In addition to teaching classes on Buddhism in the U.S. context, she writes and teaches on mass incarceration. For several years she directed the Inside Out Prison Education Program, a partnership between Warren Wilson College and the Swannanoa Correctional Center for Women. In this discussion we explore her latest monograph, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition:The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (New York University Press, 2022). Dr. Vesely-Flad Black Buddhist teachers’ insights into Buddhist wisdom, and how they align Buddhism with Black radical teachings, helping to pull Buddhism away from dominant white cultural norms. You can learn more about her work on her website BuddhismandBlackVoices.com

John E. Drabinski hosts a discussion with Sarah Jane Cervenak, who teaches in the departments of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of a number of critical essays on African American art and literature with particular focus on Black feminist writing and performance, and has written two books - Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke, 2014) and Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, and Ungiven Life (Duke, 2021), which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the motivations and aims of the project, the relationship between writing, performance, and art, and the complexity of thinking about gathering, self-possession, and the given and ungiven dimensions of life in literature and the arts.

In this podcast, we discuss the cover photograph “Denver” by Xaviera Simmons. Simmons’ biography and overview of work can be seen here at the Guggenheim website.

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Autumn Womack, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where she teaches and writes on 19th and early 20th century African American literature and cultural history and where she has worked as part of the curatorial team at the Toni Morrison Papers project. She is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals as well as popular intellectual venues including LA Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. Autumn is the author of the book The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930, which is the occasion for our conversation that follows. The book was published by University of Chicago Press in 2022 and was the winner of the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize in 2023.

A discussion with Jay Rajiva, who teaches in the Department of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has published widely in anglophone postcolonial literary studies, focusing on South Asia and English language works from sub-Saharan Africa. Rajiva authored the 2017 work Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing of Trauma, published by Bloomsbury Press, and is the author of Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature, published in 2020 by Routledge, the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the fecundity of animism as an interpretative frame, the ongoing relevance of traumatic memory in a range of postcolonial literatures, narrative and the complexity of representation, and the nature and promise of comparative, intertextual study.

A discussion with Lee McBride, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio where he also serves as Chair of Africana Studies. He writes on a wide range of issues in American philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and topics of race, affect, and political justice. He is the author of Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed, published in 2021 by Bloomsbury and this book is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the book, the place of pragmatism in thinking about race, justice, and liberation work, pessimism and hope, the importance of recasting John Dewey’s thought, and the transformative work and influence of Leonard Harris’ notion of an insurrectionist ethics.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Benjamin Barson, who teaches in the Department of Music at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He is a practicing saxophone player who has worked with Fred Ho and other musicians dedicated to merging musical practice with radical politics. In addition to a number of musical pieces, journal and other publications, he is the author of Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we explore the origins of the project, its wide historical and political vision, and the place of brass brand music in political mobilizations past, present, and future.

A conversation with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, associate professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has written widely in popular and scholarly venues on African American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on the Black feminist tradition, queer theory, and twentieth and twenty first century literary and cultural works. Mecca is the author of three books. Blue Talk and Love, a short story collection from 2015, was the winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary, and she recently published the novel Big Girl with W.W. Norton & Co. in 2022. She is also the author of the critical work The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, published by University of Illinois Press in 2021 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the project, the curiosities, political interests, and theoretical orientation behind her exploration of literary, sound, and visual cultures, as well as relationship between her fiction writing and work in critical theory. 

We also discuss the artist Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, whose painting Creature of the Grey Lagoon is on the book’s cover and whose work can be explored at https://www.amaryllisdejesusmoleski.com

This discussion is with Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson, an assistant professor of African American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a 2019-2020 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research interests include enslaved black life, comparative slavery, Black Atlantic studies, and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss his book Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic which was published in 2022 by the University of Georgia Press as part of its Race and the Atlantic World Series. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book where he argues how the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, she is a Lecturer in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus in 2012. Gutarra Cordero specializes in the Intellectual History of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, and her research and teaching interests include the topics of scientific racism, slavery, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. Her first book, titled She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. At Princeton, Gutarra Cordero is currently a Faculty Adviser at Forbes College and is affiliated with the Program in Latin American Studies and the Global Health Program. She has previously been a Visiting Fellow of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico and Virginia Commonwealth University. 

A conversation with Andrea Pitts, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are also affiliated with a number of other programs including the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and the Social Aspects of Health Initiative. Andrea has published widely on Latin American and Latinx philosophy, as well as decolonial and postcolonial approaches to European thinkers, with particular emphasis on such how thinkers help us reimagine approaches to gender, race, sexuality, nation, and carcerality. In this conversation, we discuss Andrea’s new book Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance, which was published in late-2021 by State University of New York University Press. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book about the place of race/gender/nation in the work of Anzaldúa and its implications for the theory and practice of philosophy.

This conversation is with Nick Nesbitt, who teaches in the Departments of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Nesbitt has published widely in black Atlantic cultural and political history, with particular attention to the francophone Caribbean and French Marxism. He is the author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (UVA 2003), Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (UVA 2008), Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013), and the editor of The Haitian Revolution, a collection of writings by Toussaint L'Ouverture (Verso 2008). His new book, the occasion for this conversation, is titled The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean, published in April 2022 by University of Virginia Press. In this conversation with Keisha Allan and John Drabinski, Nesbitt explores the argument of The Price of Slavery concerning the meaning of capitalism, commodification, and slavery in the Caribbean, with specific emphasis on Marx's key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value.

This discussion is with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. She is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and Africana Studies. Previously, Dr. Nwokocha held a position as a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Religion at Princeton University and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Culture, Society and Religion at Princeton. She obtained a Ph.D. with distinction in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a master's degree in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a bachelor's degree in Black studies and Feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Nwokocha was a Ford Predoctoral Fellow during her PhD and Ronald E McNair Scholar as an undergraduate. In this conversation, we discuss her book, Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), an ethnographic study of fashion, spirit possession, and gender and sexuality in contemporary Haitian Vodou, exploring Black religious communities through their innovative ceremonial practices. The book is featured within the series Where Religion Lives. 

Dr. Nwokocha is currently working on her second book project which is tentatively entitled: “‘Tell My Spirit’: Black Queer Women in Haitian Vodou,” which investigates Black queer women’s interactions with Haitian Vodou divinities, their performance of ritual work, and their formation

of religious communities in multiple locations including Montréal, Canada; Miami, Florida; Havana, Cuba; Paris, France; Brooklyn, New York, and Northern California. Nwokocha has been featured in the Journal of Haitian Studies, Harvard Divinity Bulletin Magazine, Reading Religion, and Women Studies Quarterly.

A discussion with three scholars of Frantz Fanon’s work and legacy. Rose Ferreria da Silva, Professor at State University of Bahia in Brazil, who writes on race, politics, Afro-Brazilian literature, and comparative ethnic and African studies, speaks to Fanon's legacy in Afro-Brazilian thought and political movements. She is joined by Lou Turner, who teaches Black political thought and its radical iterations in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois and argues for the centrality of Fanon for the Black radical tradition. They are also are joined by Nigel Gibson, who teaches in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, and is the editor and author of numerous articles and book-length treatments of Fanon’s work, including the work we are discussing here - Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth, published by Daraja Press in 2021. Discussion covers the nature of Fanon's ability to travel as a theorist across time and geography, the persistence of anti- and post-colonial questions, and the relationship between political theory, decolonial thought, and movements across the global south.

This discussion is with Dr. Ashley M. Williard, an assistant professor in the Francophone Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, where her research examines disability, gender, and race in the early modern French-speaking world. Her research has appeared in publications including Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, Early Modern Women, and Esprit Créateur, among others. Her second book project, currently entitled Disruptive Minds: Madness in the Early French Atlantic, examines the ways mediated voices of the "mad" can expose sites of subjectivity that interrogate colonial power structures and archival silences. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for work on this new project. Our conversation here focuses on her first book, entitled Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean published by University of Nebraska Press in 2021 where she argues how reconstructions of masculinity and femininity upheld slavery and nascent ideas of race in the seventeenth-century Antilles.

A conversation with Zeyad el Nabolsy, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Grant Farred about the forthcoming collection Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, forthcoming in spring 2022 with Temple University Press. The volume addresses the history and future of the field of Africana studies, with emphasis on theoretical innovations and possibilities in Africa and the black Atlantic.

Zeyad el Nabolsy is a doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he works on African iterations of philosophy, culture, and Marxism in a continental and global intellectual context and has authored a piece on political economy and African philosophy for the volume under discussion. Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, the author of the volume’s Afterword, is Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick and writes on philosophy and cultural theory with particular emphasis on francophone Africa, including Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960, which was published in 2021 by Liverpool University Press. Grant Farred, the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he writes and teaches philosophy, cultural studies, and literature in a black Atlantic context. Grant is the author of a number of books, including most recently An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America, published by University of Minnesota in late 2021.

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counter-narrative.

Today’s discussion is with Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has written and published in both academic and popular venues on issues of racial capitalism, climate justice, and the legacy of colonialism in our political thinking and practices. He is the author of Elite Capture, forthcoming with Haymarket Books, and Reconsidering Reparations, published by Oxford University Press in early 2022 and which we are discussing today.

This discussion is with Dr. Andrea Davis, she is an Associate Professor at York University,Toronto in the Department of Humanities and the Academic Convenor of the 2023 Congress of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She teaches and supervises in literatures and cultures of the Black Americas and holds cross-appointments in the graduate programs in English; Interdisciplinary Studies; Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies; as well as Social and Political Thought. In this discussion, we discuss her book Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women's Cultural Critiques of Nation where she employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formation, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism and the hierarchical nuclear family. 

Today’s conversation is with Bruce Janz, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, where he also co-directs the Center for Humanities and Digital Research. In addition to dozens of articles, he is the editor of a special journal issue with History of Intellectual Culture on space and interdisciplinarity and a volume with Springer titled Place, Space, and Hermeneutics. With Shaun Gallagher, Lauren Reinerman, Patsy Morrow, and Jorg Trempler, he co-authored A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder: Toward a Non-Reductive Cognitive Science, published in 2015 with Palgrave-MacMillan. Janz is the single author of two books on African philosophy: Philosophy in an African Place, published by Lexington Books in 2009, and a book just out with Bloomsbury Publishing entitled African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition: The Space of Thought, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we examine the meaning of “Africa” and “philosophy,” what the conjoining of both terms means for wisdom, politics, culture, and tradition, and how thinking, in that conjunction, is linked to conceptions of place.

This conversation is with Nick Bromell, Professor Emeritus in the English Department at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. Bromell is the author of numerous articles on 19th and 20th century literature and politics, and has edited the Norton Critical Edition of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom, as well as a collection of essays under the title The Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (University of Kentucky Press, 2018). He is the author of four books: By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (University of Chicago, 1993), Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2000), The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2013), and a new book, the occasion for our conversation today, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, out with Duke University Press in 2021.

In The Powers of Dignity, Bromell centers on the notion of dignity and its cognates in Douglass’ work and, by way of that focus, develops a broad, comprehensive picture of a political philosophy rooted in what Douglass calls “the slave experience.” In our discussion here , we explore themes of race, racism, Republicanism, liberalism, and the complexities of imagining Black liberation in the 19th century up through the 21st century. 

A conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor in the English Department at Yale University, where his research and teaching focus on African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the editor of the Modern Language Association Options for Teaching volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and co-editor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space. He also serves as the deputy editor of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association. In this conversation, we discuss the key concepts and arguments in the book about centering Africa in discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure in the media studies and the environmental humanities. His book, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, the occasion for our conversation today, was published by Duke University Press in late-August 2021.  

Conversations in Atlantic Theory is a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counter-narrative.

A discussion with Diane Exavier, a writer, theater-maker, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY, about her new poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix, published in November 2021 by The 3rd Thing Press. Diane works across genres and geographies in this collection, making sense of what she calls the 4L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Her poetry, theater snippets, and thought pieces have appeared in The Atlas Review, The Racial Imaginary: Black Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, and other publications, and in 2017 she published the chapbook Teaches of Peaches. In our conversation that follows, we discuss the origins of the project The Math of Saint Felix, its composition in sound and word, and the place of grief, mourning, remembrance, and beauty in poetry and poetics.