Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Amber Jamilla Musser, a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). 

This discussion is with Philip Janzen, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Florida. He studies the cultural and intellectual histories linking Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean, published by Duke University Press in 2025. His research has also appeared in the American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, and the Journal of Social History.

This episode includes discussions of suicide within the historical contexts of slavery, colonization, and empire. Please listen with care and be mindful of your well-being as you engage with this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis or struggling, you are not alone. Support is available through the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or by texting TALK to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. Thank you and please make sure to take care of yourself.This discussion is with Dr. Doyle D. Calhoun, University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He is the author of (Duke University Press, 2024) and, with Cheikh Thiam, the co-editor of Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures (Yale French Studies nos. 144/145, Yale University Press, 2025). With Alioune Fall and Cheikh Thiam, he is the translator and editor of Senghor: Essential Writings on African Aesthetics and Philosophy (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He has published widely on the literatures and cinemas of West Africa and the Caribbean. He is the recipient of the Malcom Bowie Prize from the Society of French Studies, the William R. Parker Prize from the MLA, the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History, and the Vivien Law Prize from the Henry Sweet Society.In today's conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire where he charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Dr. Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

This discussion is with Dr. Therí A. Pickens received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (P'05) and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA (2010).  She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies.In today's conversation, we discuss her debut poetry collection What Had Happened Was, where she addresses topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability.

This discussion is with Dr. Jessie Cox, an Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph, the topic of this conversation, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP, 2025) addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life. Dr. Cox makes music about the universe and our future in it. Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. Taking Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, he uses music to imagine unthought futures, asking questions about existence and the ways we make spaces habitable. 

This discussion is with Dr. Devin Bryson and Dr. Molly Enz.  Dr. Bryson is a professor of French and Francophone studies and Gender and Women's studies in the global studies program at Illinois College. He has published work in Research in African Literatures, the Journal of the African Literature Association, Black Camera, and African Studies Review. His research focuses on the cultural, cinematic, and literary practices and products from Francophone Africa, especially Senegal, and how those practices and products circulate locally and globally to reconfigure conceptualizations of African people, spaces, and relations. Dr. Enz is a distinguished professor of French and global studies at South Dakota State University. Her research focuses on Francophone literature and cinema from West Africa and the Caribbean. She has published articles in Black Camera, African Studies Quarterly, the Journal of the African Literature Association, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, the French Review, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies. In Projections of Dakar: (Re)Imagining Urban Senegal through Cinema, the discussion for this conversation, Dr. Bryson and Dr. Enz illustrate how Senegalese filmmakers reimagine Africa as a place that will lead to a better future for its inhabitants.

This discussion is with Dr. Jody Benjamin, a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. He received his PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2016. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the colonial archive. His first book, the topic for this discussion, The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850 (Ohio University Press New African History Series, 2024), explores questions of state-making, social hierarchy and self-making across parts of Mali, Senegal and Guinea through the lens of textiles and dress in a context shaped by an emergent global capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. Prof. Benjamin's scholarship interrogates the multiple connections between west African, African diaspora and global histories through the lens of material culture, technology, labor, gender and race in order to reshape how historians think about western Africa's role in the history of global capitalism and its connections to contemporary questions of global inequality. Prior to Howard University, Dr. Benjamin taught at the University of California, Riverside. From 2021-2023, he was the Principal Investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Unarchiving Blackness” exploring archival practices in African and African Diaspora Studies. Dr. Benjamin's work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

This discussion is with Dr. Sandhya Shukla is associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia,where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. She is the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in academic publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology, as well as the news-oriented The Conversation. In this discussion, we explore her most recent work Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024). Dr. Shukla argues that cosmopolitanism and racial belonging need not be seen as contradictory. Cross-Cultural Harlem offers a vision of sustained dialogue to respond to the challenges of urban transformations and to affirm the future of Harlem as actual place and global symbol.

This discussion is with Dr. Laura Helton, a historian who writes about collections and how they shape our world. She is an Associate Professor of English and History at the University of Delaware, where she teaches African American literature, book history, archival studies, and public humanities. Her interest in the social history of archives arose from her earlier career as an archivist. She is a Scholar-Editor of “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg,” a collaborative digital project with Fisk University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her writing chronicles the emergence of African diasporic archives in the United States and, more broadly, asks how information practices–material acts of collecting, collation, and cataloging–scaffold literary and historical thought. Her first book, the topic of this discussion, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, was published by Columbia University Press in April 2024. It won the Arline Custer Memorial Book Prize from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and was a finalist for the 2025 Book Prize from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. In this conversation, we discuss the stories of Black collectors and the social life of collecting. Helton showcase Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future. 

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 conversation is with Mary Hicks, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches the history of the Black Atlantic and Latin America. Her research has been published in Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Global Slavery, and a number of collections on slavery, the Atlantic world, and the meaning of Black history. She is the author of Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2025 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the adventurous and curious character of archival research, the complexity of telling historical stories, and the significance of Captive Cosmopolitans for thinking about contemporary Black life.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 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.

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 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. 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. 

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.  

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.  

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.

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.

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 ofMethod, 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 20years 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. 

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.   

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 formationof 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. 

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.

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. 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. 

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 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 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)

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

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.

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 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 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.