Conversations in Atlantic Theory

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 counter-narrative.

Today’s discussion is with Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has written and published in both academic and popular venues on issues of racial capitalism, climate justice, and the legacy of colonialism in our political thinking and practices. He is the author of Elite Capture, forthcoming with Haymarket Books, and Reconsidering Reparations, published by Oxford University Press in early 2022 and which we are discussing today.

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 explores how the frame of queer flesh, entangled with the question of blackness, changes how we read key aspects of African American literature - in particular, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. As well, we explore the implications of these re-readings for theorizing subjectivity and how the frame of Black queer flesh exposes our habitual appeal to the very forms of subjectivity that condition and sustain anti-blackness.

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 radical iterations in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois and argues for the centrality of Fanon for the Black radical tradition. They are also are joined by Nigel Gibson, who teaches in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, and is the editor and author of numerous articles and book-length treatments of Fanon’s work, including the work we are discussing here - Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth, published by Daraja Press in 2021. Discussion covers the nature of Fanon's ability to travel as a theorist across time and geography, the persistence of anti- and post-colonial questions, and the relationship between political theory, decolonial thought, and movements across the global south.

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, published by SUNY Press; Phenomenal Blackness, our occasion for discussion today, which appeared in late 2021 with University of Chicago Press and the forthcoming Critique of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Philosophy. In this conversation, we explore the influence of key figures in German critical theory on post-WWII African American writers and political intellectuals.

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 we discuss in this episode. We cover questions of Hurston as philosopher, the place of Black joy in theorizing Black life in an anti-Black world, and how The Politics of Black Joy opens up new horizons of philosophical thinking and the African American intellectual tradition.

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 book titled Losing the Party of Lincoln: George Washington Lee and the Struggle for the Soul of the Republican Party, which explores the life and work of George Washington Lee, an African American Republican operative and civil rights activist who lived in Memphis in the middle of the twentieth century. Goudsouzian is the author of five books, including most recently Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, published in 2014, and 2019’s The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America.

Together, Goudsouzian and McKinney edited the 2018 collection An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, published by University of Kentucky Press, which we discuss in this episode. 

Today’s discussion with Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez, who teaches in the Department 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 Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, which was published in late 2020 by Northwestern University Press and was the winner of the MLA prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies.

You can read about her current projects at her personal website (http://www.yomairafigueroa.com), as well as ongoing curatorial work at the website for Electric Marronage. To view the Knowledge Unlatched (open access) edition of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, visit https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/49666.

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 the Black Cooperative Movement, forthcoming in early April 2022 with University of North Carolina Press. Topics include what it means to write and think theoretically about activist figures, to embed theoretical figures in social and political history, and the stakes of thinking about Black life as in the present and not inextricably, irretrievably tied to the abject past nor to a future of hope.

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 published widely in European philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophical questions arising from racialized experience in the Americas, and anti- and de-colonial theory in the black Atlantic. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence was published in 2013 by State University of New York Press, and her second book, which is the topic of this conversation, was published in 2020 by Northwestern University Press and is titled Creolizing the Nation.

The opening poem "Nothing to Declare," read by Kris Sealey, was written Lauren K. Alleyne. Many thanks to the poet for permission to include this reading of her gorgeous, evocative poem.

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 Baltimore, MD. She has published extensively on African literature, philosophy, and politics in both scholarly and popular venues. Her first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, is a compelling comparative study, creating intellectual space within which it is possible to connect the motifs and imperatives of 19th century Russian realist literature to the literature of South Africa in the apartheid era and postcolonial moment. Her new book, which is under discussion in the conversation, was published in early 2021 with Princeton University Press and is titled The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing.