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.