Conversations in Atlantic Theory

A conversation with Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor in the English Department at Yale University, where his research and teaching focus on African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the editor of the Modern Language Association Options for Teaching volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and co-editor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space. He also serves as the deputy editor of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association. In this conversation, we discuss the key concepts and arguments in the book about centering Africa in discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure in the media studies and the environmental humanities. His book, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, the occasion for our conversation today, was published by Duke University Press in late-August 2021.  

This conversation is with Nick Nesbitt, who teaches in the Departments of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Nesbitt has published widely in black Atlantic cultural and political history, with particular attention to the francophone Caribbean and French Marxism. He is the author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (UVA 2003), Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (UVA 2008), Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013), and the editor of The Haitian Revolution, a collection of writings by Toussaint L'Ouverture (Verso 2008). His new book, the occasion for this conversation, is titled The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean, published in April 2022 by University of Virginia Press. In this conversation with Keisha Allan and John Drabinski, Nesbitt explores the argument of The Price of Slavery concerning the meaning of capitalism, commodification, and slavery in the Caribbean, with specific emphasis on Marx's key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value.

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, including most recently Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, published in 2013 by New York University Press, and the 2015 publication of the tenth anniversary edition of his classic text New Black Man with Routledge. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between African American music, mourning, cultural politics, and mobilization in the digital age after our analogue moment. His book Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, the occasion for our conversation today, was published by New York University Press in early-March 2022.

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 widely on Latin American and Latinx philosophy, as well as decolonial and postcolonial approaches to European thinkers, with particular emphasis on such how thinkers help us reimagine approaches to gender, race, sexuality, nation, and carcerality. In this conversation, we discuss Andrea’s new book Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance, which was published in late-2021 by State University of New York University Press. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book about the place of race/gender/nation in the work of Anzaldúa and its implications for the theory and practice of philosophy.

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: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, which was published in late-March 2022 by New York University Press. Our conversation focuses here on its key arguments about the place of theater in the Civil Rights Movement and the long project of Black freedom struggle.

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-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counter-narrative.

A discussion with Diane Exavier, a writer, theater-maker, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY, about her new poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix, published in November 2021 by The 3rd Thing Press. Diane works across genres and geographies in this collection, making sense of what she calls the 4L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Her poetry, theater snippets, and thought pieces have appeared in The Atlas Review, The Racial Imaginary: Black Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, and other publications, and in 2017 she published the chapbook Teaches of Peaches. In our conversation that follows, we discuss the origins of the project The Math of Saint Felix, its composition in sound and word, and the place of grief, mourning, remembrance, and beauty in poetry and poetics.

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-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counter-narrative.

This discussion is with Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. He has published widely in popular and academic outlets on theology, political theory, and philosophy, with particular emphasis on politics and the history of Christian thought. Adam has authored ten books, including recent works The Prince of this World in 2016 and Neoliberalism’s Demons in 2018, both with Stanford University Press, and 2020’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory with Edinburgh University Press. His new book, which is our occasion for conversation today, is titled What is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life, published in late-2021 by Fordham University Press.

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, employing multiple methods to understand the power of discourse in shaping democratic life. She is the author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance, published in 2015 by Oxford University Press, as well as Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, also published by Oxford University Press in late-2021 and is the occasion for our conversation today. This podcast explores the origins of the project, the role of social movements in democratic life, the location of knowledge production in conversation and discussion, the future of Black liberation struggle, and the critical function of radical Black feminist pragmatism in thinking through our moment. Cover art by Kei Williams, which gets some discussion in this conversation.

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 Dispossessions, an historical reflection on Black-Indigenous political and culture work in Detroit, Michigan. He is also the author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, published in late-2021 by Beacon Press, which is our topic of discussion in this podcast. We cover issues of comparative study, the complex mix of conflict and complement in the hyphen in "Afro-Indigenous," the past of solidarity in struggle, and the future of the same.

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, published by University of Chicago Press; New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, published in 2017 by University of Chicago Press; and the book we are discussing in this episode, How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism, out with Indiana University Press in late 2021. This conversation covers issues of Judaism's complex composition as a philosophical position, the scope of phenomenology as a method of reading, possibilities for thinking catastrophe in a comparative context, and the meaning of world and worldhood, awe and outrage, in a broken world.