Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Kaiama L. Glover, she is an Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College at Columbia University. She has written extensively about Caribbean literature in works such as Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010), and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of prose fiction and non-fiction. She has also been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the co-host of WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. Her current project, an intellectual biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life," has been supported by fellowships at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the New York Public Library Cullman Center.  In this conversation, we discuss A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being published by Duke University Press in 2021. Our conversation here focuses on championing unruly female protagonists in selected Caribbean literary works and expanding modes of theorization. 

This discussion is with Dr. Ashley M. Williard, an assistant professor in the Francophone Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, where her research examines disability, gender, and race in the early modern French-speaking world. Her research has appeared in publications including Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, Early Modern Women, and Esprit Créateur, among others. Her second book project, currently entitled Disruptive Minds: Madness in the Early French Atlantic, examines the ways mediated voices of the "mad" can expose sites of subjectivity that interrogate colonial power structures and archival silences. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for work on this new project. Our conversation here focuses on her first book, entitled Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean published by University of Nebraska Press in 2021 where she argues how reconstructions of masculinity and femininity upheld slavery and nascent ideas of race in the seventeenth-century Antilles.

This discussion is with Richard Price, an anthropologist and historian who has written extensively on the history and culture of African Americans throughout the hemisphere. He has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and William & Mary, and in France, the Netherlands, and Brazil. His prize-winning books, translated into several languages, include First-Time, Alabi’s World, The Convict and the Colonel, Travels with Tooy, and Rainforest Warriors and most recently with Sally Price, Saamaka Dreaming and Maroons in Guyane. In this conversation, we discuss Maroons in Guyane: Past, Present, Future published by University of Georgia Press in 2022. His forthcoming memoir, Inside/Outside, will be published in October 2022. Our conversation here focuses on the history of Maroon peoples in Guyane, how these groups differ from one another, and their current situations.  

A discussion with Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She teaches and publishes widely in African-American literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on post-Antebellum literature up to the Harlem Renaissance. Her 2020 book Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel, published by Louisiana State University Press and awarded Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for work on African American literature and culture in 2022, is the occasion for our conversation today. This book revisits discourses of race and cultural production in the works of Francis Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Charles Chestnutt. In this conversation, we explore the interracial lines of influence and African American literariness, with special attention to how such literariness marks this early period of writing with a peculiar mix of critique, vision of the future, and the distinctiveness of racial formation in key literary works and then-emerging writerly traditions. She is currently at work on a book-length study of Andrea Lee's fiction, a broad take on which is in a forthcoming essay in The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth Century American Literature.

A discussion with Jay Rajiva, who teaches in the Department of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has published widely in anglophone postcolonial literary studies, focusing on South Asia and English language works from sub-Saharan Africa. Rajiva authored the 2017 work Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing of Trauma, published by Bloomsbury Press, and is the author of Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature, published in 2020 by Routledge, the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the fecundity of animism as an interpretative frame, the ongoing relevance of traumatic memory in a range of postcolonial literatures, narrative and the complexity of representation, and the nature and promise of comparative, intertextual study.

This discussion is with Dr. Jacqueline Couti, she is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French Studies at Rice university. Her research and teaching interests delve into the transatlantic and transnational interconnections between cultural productions from continental France and its now former colonies. A central theme of her research is how local knowledge in the colonial and post-colonial eras has shaped the literatures, and the cultural awareness of the self, in former French colonies through specific representations of sexuality. She is the author of Dangerous Creole Liaisons (2016) and “Lumina Sophie, Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” in Women Claiming Freedom: Gender, Race, and Liberty in the Americas. In this conversation, we discuss Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924-1948 published by Liverpool University Press in 2021. Our conversation here focuses on key concepts and arguments in the book where she puts Metropolitan France and the French Caribbean in dialogue exploring constructions of gender, race, sexuality, identity politics, and nationalism. 

This discussion is with Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson, an assistant professor of African American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a 2019-2020 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research interests include enslaved black life, comparative slavery, Black Atlantic studies, and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss his book Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic which was published in 2022 by the University of Georgia Press as part of its Race and the Atlantic World Series. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book where he argues how the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience.

This discussion is with four contributors to a new edited collection titled The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives, published in late-2021 by Oxford University Press. We’re joined by Alex Madva, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, where he also directs the California Center for Ethics and Policy. Along with Brandon Hogan, Michael Cholbi, and Benjamin Yost, he co-edited this collection and is the co-author with Cholbi of the included piece “Can Capital Punishment Survive Black Lives Matter”? Vanessa Wills, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and authored the essay “‘He Ate Jim Crow’: Racist Ideology as False Consciousness,” which takes up Karl Marx’s treatment of ideology as a way to understand the persistence of antiblack racism. Ian Olasov, a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, who authored an essay in the volume on philosophy, language, and how we talk about Black liberation, titled “The Movement for Black Lives and the Language of Liberation.” And Dana Miranda, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts at Boston, the author of “The Violence of Leadership in Black Lives Matter,” which examines the relationship between movement aims and the distinction between leadership and mobilizations that are leaderful.

A discussion is with Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White, editors of a new collection titled Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution, out with Bloomsbury Publishing in late-2021. Kir teaches in the Department of English at State University of New York at Albany in Albany, New York, and is the author of numerous articles and the book Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism, published by Fordham University Press, 2014. Deborah teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she has written widely on 19th and 20th century literature and thought, and is the author of Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History, published by Stanford University Press in 2000. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world’s literary imagination, the long shadow and persistence of romanticism, and the enduring significance of Haitian history and thought for thinking through issues of race, nation, revolution, literature, and conceptions of the new.

This discussion is with Dr. Sarah J. Zimmerman, an Associate Professor of history at Western Washington University and is the Vice President of the French Colonial Historical Society. Her research focuses on women and gender in West Africa, French Empire, and the Atlantic World. Her current research attends to the gendered production of history and memory on Gorée Island--a UNESCO World Heritage site in Senegal. She has published articles in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and Les Temps Modernes. In this conversation, we discuss her first monograph,  Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire was published in 2020 by Ohio University Press. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book where she historicizes militarization, marriage, and colonialism by focusing on tirailleurs sénégalais households in West Africa and across French Empire.