Conversations in Atlantic Theory

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.

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 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.

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 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.