Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This conversation is with Habiba Ibrahim, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. In addition to a number of published articles on African American literature and cultural studies, Ibrahim co-edited with Badia Ahad a 2022 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly organized around the theme “Black Temporality in Times of Crisis.” She is the author of two books: 2012’s Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiculturalism, published by University of Minnesota Press and Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life, published in 2021 by New York University Press and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the complexity of time and the body in Black life and literary culture, the oceanic and memory, humanism and what comes next, and the meaning of Black childhood in an antiblack world and its history. The cover art discussed in the podcast is "Little Swimmer" (2016), a painting by Calida Garcia Rowles (https://calidarawles.com)

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Nicholas Harrison, he is a Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at King’s College London. During his

student years he worked as a teacher at the university of Tunis, at a school in rural Quebec, and at the ENS in Paris. He returned to the UK to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1992. There he began work on francophone literature of the Maghreb, and went on to become the first person to teach that material at Cambridge and then at University College London. His research interests are quite diverse, stretching across film, translation studies, and comparative literature, but one of his recurring concerns has been the sort of political work that literary texts – and also films – are understood to do, or imagined to do, by writers, censors, critics, and teachers. His first book, Circles of Censorship, appeared in 1995; his second, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction, in 2003, and his third, which we will discuss today is titled Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education – which is now available on open access – in 2019.

This conversation is with Rinaldo Walcott, who teaches in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto, where he is the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (1997), Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (2000), Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies (2016) - all with Insomniac Press), On Property (2021) with Biblioasis, and most recently The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom, published with Duke University Press and the occasion for our conversation today. In our conversation here, we explore the relationship between emancipation and freedom, the enigma of time in Black freedom struggle, music and meaning, expression and mobilization, and the complexity of pessimism in our long-age of antiblack violence. Cover art, discussed at the beginning of the podcast, is "A Single Section: The Journey #2" (2016) by Torkwase Dyson.

This discussion is with Dr. Felisa Vergara Reynold, an Associate Professor of French for the Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Her focus is on literature in French from the Antilles, West Africa, and North Africa. She primarily works on the legacy and impact of colonialism on literature in French, from the former colonies, and is particularly concerned with the continued influence of colonialism in the post-colonial era, and how it is represented in cultural production. In this discussion, we discuss her book The Author as Cannibal: Re-Writing in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre (1969-1995) where Dr. Reynolds presents textual revisions of Francophone authors as figurative acts of cannibalism and examines how these literary cannibalizations critique colonialism and its legacy in each author’s homeland.

This discussion is with Dr. Brian Valente-Quinn, he is an associate professor of Francophone African Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the histories and politics of theatrical performance in West Africa, and especially the stage’s interplay with questions of decoloniality, Pan-Africanism, popular culture, and forms of activist performance. In this discussion we discuss his book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, where he employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the reworkings and innovations of stage spaces and performance practices in Senegal from the colonial era to the present day. 

Today’s conversation is with Bruce Janz, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, where he also co-directs the Center for Humanities and Digital Research. In addition to dozens of articles, he is the editor of a special journal issue with History of Intellectual Culture on space and interdisciplinarity and a volume with Springer titled Place, Space, and Hermeneutics. With Shaun Gallagher, Lauren Reinerman, Patsy Morrow, and Jorg Trempler, he co-authored A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder: Toward a Non-Reductive Cognitive Science, published in 2015 with Palgrave-MacMillan. Janz is the single author of two books on African philosophy: Philosophy in an African Place, published by Lexington Books in 2009, and a book just out with Bloomsbury Publishing entitled African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition: The Space of Thought, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we examine the meaning of “Africa” and “philosophy,” what the conjoining of both terms means for wisdom, politics, culture, and tradition, and how thinking, in that conjunction, is linked to conceptions of place.

This conversation is with Nick Bromell, Professor Emeritus in the English Department at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. Bromell is the author of numerous articles on 19th and 20th century literature and politics, and has edited the Norton Critical Edition of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom, as well as a collection of essays under the title The Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (University of Kentucky Press, 2018). He is the author of four books: By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (University of Chicago, 1993), Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2000), The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2013), and a new book, the occasion for our conversation today, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, out with Duke University Press in 2021.

In The Powers of Dignity, Bromell centers on the notion of dignity and its cognates in Douglass’ work and, by way of that focus, develops a broad, comprehensive picture of a political philosophy rooted in what Douglass calls “the slave experience.” In our discussion here , we explore themes of race, racism, Republicanism, liberalism, and the complexities of imagining Black liberation in the 19th century up through the 21st century. 

This discussion is with Professor Sandra Gunning, Dr. Gunning is a literary scholar working jointly in the Department of American Culture, and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently she’s at work on an alternate Black literary history of the American Civil War. In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Gunning’s Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic where she examines 19th century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. 

This discussion is with Dr. Muriam Haleh Davis, Dr. Davis teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the author of Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke University Press, 2022). Her research studies the relationship between decolonization and the history of the social sciences. She is a frequent commentator of Algerian and French politics and her writings and interviews have been featured on NPR, France24, Al-Jazeera English, Jadaliyya, Truthout, and Public Books. 

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Catriona MacLeod, a Senior lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. Her research interests concern women in French-language graphic novels (or bandes dessinées) and migration and trauma narratives in bandes dessinées and caricatures. She has published on these topics in a range of academic journals. In this conversation, we discuss her latest monograph on female representation in  bandes dessinées, entitled Invisible Presence: Drawing Women in French Comics.