Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Dr. Gosine, a Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto. His publications include co-authorship of the text Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada and contributions to many journals including Small Axe, Wasafiri, Sexualities, Topia, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Art in America, as well as scholarly anthologies. His artwork has been exhibited internationally at various galleries and museums and he most recently curated the critically acclaimed exhibition "everything slackens in a wreck" at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York. His newest book, Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, was recently published by Duke University Press.

We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, she is a Lecturer in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus in 2012. Gutarra Cordero specializes in the Intellectual History of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, and her research and teaching interests include the topics of scientific racism, slavery, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. Her first book, titled She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. At Princeton, Gutarra Cordero is currently a Faculty Adviser at Forbes College and is affiliated with the Program in Latin American Studies and the Global Health Program. She has previously been a Visiting Fellow of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico and Virginia Commonwealth University. 

This discussion is with Dr. Elodie Silberstein (she/her), an artist and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Pace University (New York City, United States). She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University (Naarm/Melbourne, Australia), and a Master of Fine Arts from the University Paul-Valery (Montpellier, France). Her research focuses on the representations of femininity in the visual landscape – from fine art to mass media – as a prism through which to map issues of social justice in a globalized world. She investigates the way these depictions have reflected social, racial, and environmental inequalities at a geopolitical level. Her first monograph examines the evolution of the depictions of black femininity in French visual culture. Drawing on a broad spectrum of archives extending back to the late 18th century – paintings, fashion plates, prints, photographs, and films – Animality and Humanity in French Late Modern Representations of Black Femininity (Routledge) traces the ways a patriarchal imperialism and a global capitalism have paired black women with the realm of nature to justify the exploitation both of people and of ecosystems.

When not scouring flea markets for historical material, Elodie chairs panel discussions and writes for the media on subjects ranging from the portrayal of young femininity in the 19th century European postcard industry to the politics of black femininity in the Barbie Fashionistas. She completed a four-year membership of the Darebin Women’s Advisory Committee which provides guidance to the City of Darebin (Naarm/Melbourne) on gender policies.

This discussion is with Adrienne Cohen, an Assistant Professor of cultural anthropology at Colorado State University. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea, West Africa on urban dance and political change, and in the United States among migrant artists from Guinea. Cohen is the author of Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, African Studies Review, and Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute. 

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Jennifer Nesbitt, professor of English at the York campus of The Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches everything from first-year composition to upper-division courses in women’s writing and Caribbean culture. She is the author of two books: Narrative Settlements: Genre and Geography in British Women’s Fiction, 1918-1939,  from the University of Toronto Press in 2005, a survey of place, nation, and gender as women writers responded to enfranchisement in the wake of World War I.  As she was completing that project, the idea for her second book, Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture, emerged from classroom experiences and burgeoned into a cross-cultural examination of the presence of rum as a marker for the transformation (or not) of colonial ideologies and subjects in the decolonial and postcolonial period. In addition to this work, she has held the position of editor of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 since 2020 and is active in the Feminist inter/Modernist Studies Association. From 2013-2016, Dr. Nesbitt enjoyed working with popular media and community groups to discuss the PBS television series Downton Abbey; she has published two essays about, respectively, gender and race in that series. Her work has appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, ARIEL, Clues: The Journal of Detective Fiction, Film & History, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others.  Currently she is working on a digital cluster on whiteness and modernist studies and she continues to explore the role of rum in late-twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

 
We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Robin Brooks,  an associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with an impressive record of scholarship that examines a range of cultural matters concerning Black communities in the United States and the wider African Diaspora. Primary research and teaching interests for Dr. Brooks include contemporary cultural and literary studies as well as working-class studies, Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, higher education management, and education policy. Her research is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been featured in several news media outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and she has delivered countless presentations on her work at national and international conferences. Her interdisciplinary work appeals to various audiences and is solution-oriented in order to contribute to dismantling racial and related hierarchies. Challenging conventional boundaries, her scholarship uncovers overlooked and underexamined ways in which African Diasporic cultural representations participate in antiracist and anti-discriminatory struggles. In this conversation we discuss her book Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (UNC Press, 2022), which is a book that examines how contemporary writers use literary portrayals of class to critique inequalities and divisions in the U.S. and Caribbean. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida and an MA in Afro American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

We are joined by Dr. Keisha Allan, she is an assistant professor in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship and the McKittrick Book Award.nRecently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms in their postcolonial societies. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary.

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Emily Marker, she is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research and teaching interests are in imperial and postcolonial Europe, francophone Africa, race, religion, youth, and global history. Her work has been published in The American Historical Review, French Politics, Culture & Society, and Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge. She has also co-edited, with Dr. Christy Pichichero, a three-part series of special issues on race and racism in France and the Francophone world today in H-France Salon. In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Marker works on initiatives for social justice and equity in the academy. A co-founder of the Race and Pedagogy Working Group at the University of Chicago, she organizes workshops, facilitations, and community classes on power, privilege, and inclusive teaching. She is a member of the Graduate Faculty in History at Rutgers-New Brunswick and Rutgers’ Center for African Studies, and former member of the Governing Council of the Western Society for French History (WSFH). She currently chairs the Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize Committee and the WSFH engagé.e.s program. In this conversation, we discuss the entangled history of European integration and African decolonization and the inclusion of the postwar empire in the construction of Europe during the postwar era through the lens of youth and education initiatives.  

A discussion with Lee McBride, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio where he also serves as Chair of Africana Studies. He writes on a wide range of issues in American philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and topics of race, affect, and political justice. He is the author of Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed, published in 2021 by Bloomsbury and this book is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the book, the place of pragmatism in thinking about race, justice, and liberation work, pessimism and hope, the importance of recasting John Dewey’s thought, and the transformative work and influence of Leonard Harris’ notion of an insurrectionist ethics.

This discussion is with Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, a Professor of History at Howard University in Washington DC. She is a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history, her work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of demands of reparations for slavery and colonialism. She has a particular interest in the memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery. Her two recent single-authored books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (2020) and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017). She has been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project since 2017. She also serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review, the editorial board of the Journal of Slavery and Abolition, and the editorial review board of the African Studies Review. in this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Museums and Atlantic Slavery published by Routledge in 2021. Our conversation here examines how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas.

This discussion is with Dr. Lindsey B. Green-Simms, a Professor of Literature at American University, Washington D.C. where she teaches classes on film and fiction from Africa and the global South. In this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Queer African Cinemas, published by Duke University Press in March 2022. Our conversation here examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the 21st century.