Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
  • 5.0 (3)
  • 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.

  1. Don Thomas Deere on The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space

    APR 7

    Don Thomas Deere on The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space

    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 Don Deere, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He has published a number of articles in key journals and edited collections, is the co-translator of Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in 18th-Century Latin America, and is the author of The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space, published in 2026 on Duke University Press as part of their series Radical Américas, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we explore the importance of Latin American theorists for philosophy and philosophers, the challenge of thinking across multiple geographies, and the legacy of colonialism in our understanding of spatiality, place, and the meaning of modernity.

    53 min
  2. Jonathan Howard on Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness

    MAR 31

    Jonathan Howard on Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness

    Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His first book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the “deep” as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that blackness dawns in Middle Passage as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep, which is most fully apprehended not as social death but ecological life.

    1h 7m
  3. John Drabinski on Atlantic Theory, So Unimaginable a Price, and At the Margins of Nihilism

    MAR 24

    John Drabinski on Atlantic Theory, So Unimaginable a Price, and At the Margins of Nihilism

    Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2026) and At the Margins of Nihilism (2026). He is also the co-editor with Michael Sawyer of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and co-host of both The Black Studies Podcast and Conversations in Atlantic Theory. In today’s conversation, we explore Dr. Drabinski’s three latest monographs: In Atlantic Theory, where he traces the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism while offering a comparative account of critical thought across the Atlantic world. In So Unimaginable a Price, he turns to James Baldwin, situating his work within a broader mid-century Atlantic context and placing it in dialogue with thinkers across the Caribbean and Africa. Finally, in At the Margins of Nihilism, he develops a theoretical framework through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson, drawing on figures such as Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Baldwin to examine how different forms of nihilism operate as closed systems, and how they are unsettled through vernacular practices of life and refusal.

    1h 2m
  4. Alejandro L. Madrid on The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening

    MAR 17

    Alejandro L. Madrid on The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening

    Professor Alejandro Luis Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. Among other honors, he has received the Humboldt Research Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and awards from the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, ASCAP, IASPM, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Professor Madrid is sought after as an expert commentator by national and international media outlets, including Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, the BBC, Public Radio International, and Radio Uruguay (SODRE). He acted as music advisor to Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose movie, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, is set in early 1930s Mexico. In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, The Archive and the Aural City. Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening (Duke University Press, 2025) where he examines sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn.

    51 min
  5. Akane Kanai on The New Politics of Online Feminism

    MAR 10

    Akane Kanai on The New Politics of Online Feminism

    Dr. Akane Kanai is a feminist cultural studies scholar, currently based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She researches the relational politics of identity, with a focus on how the emotional life of social media informs cultures of everyday knowledge. Her previous book, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture, contributed a critique of relatability in theorizing the everyday regulation of emotion for young women online. Prior to joining Warwick in 2025, she was a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia.    In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph The New Politics of Online Feminism, where she argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Dr. Kanai foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.

    58 min
  6. Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

    MAR 3

    Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

    Dr. Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, environmental humanities, Black geographies, feminist theory and queer of color critique. She is currently the director of Barnard’s Interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor (ICORE/MORE), an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online.   She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life in the U.S., including, “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes such as, Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press) and The Politics of Disposability (Duke University Press). One of her essays, “The Edge of the Usual,” also appears in a compilation of essays for the 2023 Venice Biennial on Everlasting Plastics.    In today’s conversation, we discuss her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of Black dispossession. In so doing, The Elsewhere Is Black points us to the durability of racism and its many material forms: toxicity’s movement through soil and bodies, the placement of landfills, waste infrastructure, and the technocratic planning and management of Black life and death.

    52 min
  7. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez on Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

    FEB 24

    Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez on Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

    Dr.  Kathleen "Kat" Cruz Gutierrez (Ph.D. Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian history and the history of science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes on the history of botany, botanical taxonomies, and the recent scholarly "plant turn." Her research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous affiliations include De La Salle University, Manila, the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She presently serves as co-Principal Investigator for a community-engaged research initiative on Filipino agrarian labor and migration titled "Watsonville is in the Heart." For her work, she was awarded in 2024 the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California, a biannual honor that recognizes a single individual in higher education evidencing steadfast commitment to community engagement in their early careers.    In today’s conversation we discuss her latest monograph Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines where she traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization.  Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices.

    40 min
  8. Joseph M. Pierce on Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair

    FEB 10

    Joseph M. Pierce on Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair

    Dr.  Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University.    In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Pierce’s latest monograph, Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (2025, Duke University Press) where he analyzes a range of materials—from photography, literature, and sculpture to film and ethnography—revealing how speculation, as a form of situated knowledge production, can repair and reimagine the worlds that colonialism sought to destroy.

    1h 18m
See All (116)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    116
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2022 JFFP
  • Show Website
    Conversations in Atlantic Theory

You Might Also Like