Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Dr. Margaret J. Wiener is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (University of Chicago Press) won the 1995 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her publications have been grounded in many years of field research on the island of Bali, Indonesia’s most famous province, as well as foraging in colonial archives and libraries in The Netherlands. She considers herself an empirical philosopher, who brings an ethnographic sensibility to the clashes involved in colonial encounters while asking broad questions about practices of knowing and making worlds. Inspirations from thinkers in the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (STS) inform her recent book Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2025), the topic of today’s conversation. Dr. Wiener examines how the category of magic traveled from Europe through the imposition of colonial rule and the birth of anthropology. 

Her current research extends her longstanding interest in the worlds different practices produce to multispecies entanglements and conflicting visions of the future.

Dr. Mary Poole is a historian of U.S. and African history, with an emphasis on histories of social movements, racial capitalism, colonialism, feminist and other critical social theory, and Indigenous decolonizing research methods. She has served on the faculty of Prescott College in Arizona since 2003. In the 1980s, she served as a fiscal analyst for the Washington State Senate Ways & Means Committee overseeing welfare policy during a period of federal dismantling of the U.S welfare state and rapid prison expansion and the corresponding increase in racially discriminatory drug laws. She later served as Executive Director for Early Options for Unintended Pregnancy, a non-governmental organization established to teach family practice doctors techniques of early abortion.

She earned her PhD at Rutgers, which led to her first book, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (UNC: 2006) which demonstrates how the U.S. welfare state operates as a mechanism of racial capitalism, producing economic security as a property of whiteness. She has worked closely for over two decades with Meitamei Olol Dapash on land rights, environmental justice and decolonizing research, and has co-directed through that time the Institute for Maasai Education, Research & Conservation (MERC) and the Dopoi Center. In today’s conversation, we discuss  Decolonizing Maasai History: A Path to Indigenous African Futures, (Zed Books/Bloomsbury, 2025), co-authored with Meitamei Olol Dapash, where they offer a new version of Maasai history based on Maasai memory and concerns. 

Meitamei Olol-Dapash is the founder and Executive Director of the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition (MERC) a registered community-based organization in Kenya. MERC is a network of grassroots organizations and activists promoting the rights of the Maasai community and the environment.

Dr. Wendell Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. His work bridges Global Black Studies, African Studies, and Islamic Studies, with a focus on how African and diasporic intellectual traditions and expressive cultures reshape our understanding of knowledge, religion, and the humanities. 

In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities, (Columbia University Press, 2025), where he recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

Dr.José Miguel Palacios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. His work explores the relations between transnational histories of radical cinemas and questions of migration, solidarity, networks of cinematic exchange, and archival practices He has published in journals like Film Quarterly, Screen, The Moving Image, Jump Cut, and [in] Transition. In today’s conversation, we discuss his book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film & Video after 1973 (UC Press, 2025) where he offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity. 

He is currently working on a second book devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, which was awarded a Project Development Grant by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 2025.

Dr.Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. In this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art was published with Duke University Press, 2025. In this project, Dr. Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art.

Dr. Anna LaQuawn Hinton is an Assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. Dr. Hinton is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.”

She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) and CLA Journal, as well as The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, and The Palgrave Handbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature. In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing, which approaches themes in Black feminist literary studies such as aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity through a Black feminist disability frame.

A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with award-winning books including The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) . His work in critical theory and performance studies explores the intersection of history, imagination, and Black aesthetic life through the lens of performance. Tavia Nyong'o's public-facing writings have appeared in prominent publications such as Vogue, them, The Nation, n+1, Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, Cabinet, Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, and NPR.  and has been recognized with fellowships from prestigious foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He serves on multiple editorial boards and co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Currently curating public programs at the Park Avenue Armory, Nyong'o is completing groundbreaking research on topics ranging from digital technology's cultural history to racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture. In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), where he shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.

This is Fatima Seck and today’s discussion is with Dr. Danielle Roper, an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago from Kingston, Jamaica. She is also the curator of the digital exhibit: Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive.  She is from Kingston, Jamaica.

In this conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas. Dr. Roper examines blackface performance and its relationship to twentieth- and twenty-first-century nationalist fictions of mestizaje, creole nationalism, and other versions of postracialism in the Americas.

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.