Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This is Fatima Seck and 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 counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and French at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of books on the history of logic, comparative philosophy, and the legacy of life philosophy in the francophone African tradition. In this conversation, we discuss his new book Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, which examines the place of reason and rationality in the Islamic philosophical practices in Western Africa from the medieval period forward.

This is John Drabinski and 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 counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Benjamin Barson, who teaches in the Department of Music at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He is a practicing saxophone player who has worked with Fred Ho and other musicians dedicated to merging musical practice with radical politics. In addition to a number of musical pieces, journal and other publications, he is the author of Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we explore the origins of the project, its wide historical and political vision, and the place of brass brand music in political mobilizations past, present, and future.

This discussion is with Dr. Bryan Sinche, a Professor and Chair of English at the University of Hartford. He has written more than twenty essays and reviews which appear in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review, ESQ, Legacy, and Biography and in collections published by Basic Books, Cambridge University Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press. He is also the editor of two books: The Guide for Teachers accompanying the third edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014) and the first scholarly edition of Appointed: An American Novel (2019, co-edited with Eric Gardner).

In this conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, Published by the Author: Self-Publication and Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024, where he discusses the hidden history of African American self-publication and offers new ways to understand the significance of publication as a creative, reformist, and remunerative project. 

This discussion is with Professor Jenny Shaw, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama where she teaches classes in the histories of the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, Comparative Slavery & Emancipation, and Early Modern Black Britain. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and she has published in Past & Present, The William & Mary Quarterly, and Slavery & Abolition. In this conversation we discuss her latest monograph, The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. We discuss the transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. 

This discussion is with Dr. Nana Osei-Kofi,  (she/her) a Professor Emerita of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University. Her research centers on two primary lines of inquiry focused on justice and the politics of difference. One line examines structural shifts in higher education to promote equity and access, emphasizing curriculum transformation, change leadership, faculty recruitment, retention, and development. The second line explores the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe, with a focus on Sweden. In this conversation we discuss her most recent publication, AfroSwedish Places of Belonging, published by Northwestern University Press in 2024. In this work, she grapples with AfroSwedishness in relation to processes and experiences of racialization, imagination of self, and notions of belonging, agency, and kinship.

This discussion is with Dr. Étienne Achille and Dr. Oana Panaïté. Dr. Achille is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Villanova University. His publications include the monograph Mythologies postcoloniales. Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (2018, co-authored with L. Moudileno;) and the volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020, co-edited with C. Forsdick and L. Moudileno). Dr. Panaïté is a Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (2012), The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (2017), and Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory (2022). In this conversation, we discuss their monograph, Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature where they analyze the works of contemporary French novelists and explore the white literary gaze in a contemporary French context. 

This discussion is with Dr. Julia Hauser, a cultural historian interested in the entanglements of Europe, the US and Asia, mainly India and the Middle East, during the nineteenth and twentieth century. She has worked on female mission in late Ottoman Beirut, the entangled history of vegetarianism between Europe, the US, and India, and the global history of the plague. Her publications include German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut published by Leiden: Brill in 2015, and The Moral Contagion, a global history of the plague illustrated by artist Sarnath Banerjee, published by Delhi Harper Collins in 2024. In this conversation, we discuss her monograph, A Taste for Purity published by Columbia University Press in 2024 where she argues that vegetarianism during the mid-nineteenth century to the early Cold War, was motivated by expansive visions of moral, physical, and even racial purification.

This discussion is with Dr. Imani D. Owens, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.  She studies and teaches African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies at Princeton University, a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and small axe salon. She is currently a faculty fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. In this conversation we discuss her book Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia University Press: Black Lives in the Diaspora series) where she charts the connection between literary form and anti-imperialist politics in Caribbean and African American texts during the interwar period. 

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 counternarrative.

Today's discussion is with with Professor Jason Allen-Paisant, a Jamaican writer, multi-award-winning poet, Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. In this conversation, we discuss his monograph Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, published by Oxford University Press in May 2024. In this conversation, Professor Allen-Paisant explores how Césaire's work articulates for him a way in which poetry eliminates borders between the self and the external world and introduces what he calls, ‘pedagogies of participation’, ‘pedagogies of thinking with spirits’ to allow for the embrace and co-existence of multiple truths and ways of living and being.  

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 counternarrative.

Today's discussion is with Dr. Kathleen Spanos and Sinclair Emoghene. In this conversation, Sinclair and Dr. Spanos present a framework for dance practitioners and researchers working in diverse dance cultures to navigate academia and the professional dance field. The framework is based on the idea of “cultural confluences,” conjuring up an image of bodies of water meeting and flowing into and past one another, migrating through what they refer to as the mainstream and non-mainstream. Through an analysis of language, aesthetic values, spaces, creative processes, and archival research practices, the book offers a collaborative model for communicating the value that marginalized dance communities bring to the field.

Learn more at www.danceconfluences.com and follow them on Instagram @danceconfluences.