Conversations in Atlantic Theory – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.

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.