Conversations in Atlantic Theory

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, incl...

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 widel...

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: Perfor...

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-...

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-...

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, employin...

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 Dispossessi...

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 , p...

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 r...

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 exp...

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 radica...

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 ,...

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...

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 bo...

Today’s discussion with Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez , who teaches in the D epartment 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 D...

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 th...

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 publish...

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 Ba...

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 numerou...

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 i...

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 c...