Conversations in Atlantic Theory

A conversation with Geo Maher about his forthcoming book Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance, which explores the history and political character of revolutionary action and its continuity with racial justice struggle in the contemporary moment.

Geo Maher teaches in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. He is the author of numerous articles in academic venues, as well as popular and radical political media. He has written five books: ‘We Created Chavez’: A People’s History of the Bolivarian Revolution and Decolonizing Dialectics, both with Duke University Press, and with Verso he has published Building the Commune and A World Without Police. Anticolonial Eruptions is forthcoming with University of California Press in late-March 2022.

A conversation with Zeyad el Nabolsy, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, and Grant Farred about the forthcoming collection Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, forthcoming in spring 2022 with Temple University Press. The volume addresses the history and future of the field of Africana studies, with emphasis on theoretical innovations and possibilities in Africa and the black Atlantic.

Zeyad el Nabolsy is a doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he works on African iterations of philosophy, culture, and Marxism in a continental and global intellectual context and has authored a piece on political economy and African philosophy for the volume under discussion. Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, the author of the volume’s Afterword, is Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick and writes on philosophy and cultural theory with particular emphasis on francophone Africa, including Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960, which was published in 2021 by Liverpool University Press. Grant Farred, the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he writes and teaches philosophy, cultural studies, and literature in a black Atlantic context. Grant is the author of a number of books, including most recently An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America, published by University of Minnesota in late 2021.

A conversation with Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, editors of Intolerable, the new collection of speeches, pamphlets, essays, and manifestos by the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prisons Information Group), published by University of Minnesota Press in late 2021. Discussion ranges from the origins of the project to the history of GIP and the legacy it leaves in post-WWII French thought to contemporary and transnational resonance of its themes.

Kevin Thompson teaches in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, where he publishes widely in 19th and 20th century European thought and is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Normativity (Northwestern 2019). Perry Zurn teaches in the Department of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. and has written extensively on themes of curiosity, prison abolition, Foucault’s critical theory, and is the author of the book Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (Minnesota 2021).