In today’s conversation, we explore her book Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife. Through the unexpected lens of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, the work offers powerful insights into broader understandings of race in a global context.

The topic for today's conversation is his first book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, came out with Duke University Press this year (2026). Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Thomas’ latest monograph, Exorbitance:  A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, where she calls for new approaches to political sovereignty grounded in the embodied forms of autonomy and relation created in daily life.

Dr. Akinbola's newly published book, Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art examines anti-respectability, queer kinship, and diasporic homemaking in the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists. Her essays have also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly and Women Studies Quarterly.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women where she argues that for Black women, haunting is both a condition and a strategy in lived experiences and literary productions.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism, where she traces the origins and logics of the FBI wanted poster and argues how this logic continues to structure wanted posters, as well as much contemporary social scientific thinking about race.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal, (published by Duke University Press July 2025) where she analyzes  a capoeira network across West Africa, de Sá shows how urban West Africans use capoeira to explore the relationship between Blackness, diaspora, and African heritage.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Dr. Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.

Today we discuss Dr.Ortega’s monograph Binding Media. Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from across the Americas , published by Stanford University Press in March 2025, where she proposes the notion of “binding media” and provides us with an essential account of contemporary book history and highlights the way binding media help illuminate processes of cultural hybridization that have been instigated by the expediency of globalized digital technologies and transnational dynamics.   

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This discussion is with Dr. Doyle D. Calhoun, University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He is the author of (Duke University Press, 2024) and, with Cheikh Thiam, the co-editor of Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures (Yale French Studies nos. 144/145, Yale University Press, 2025). With Alioune Fall and Cheikh Thiam, he is the translator and editor of Senghor: Essential Writings on African Aesthetics and Philosophy (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He has published widely on the literatures and cinemas of West Africa and the Caribbean. He is the recipient of the Malcom Bowie Prize from the Society of French Studies, the William R. Parker Prize from the MLA, the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History, and the Vivien Law Prize from the Henry Sweet Society.

In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire where he charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Dr. Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her debut poetry collection What Had Happened Was, where she addresses topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability.

Dr. Cox makes music about the universe and our future in it. Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. Taking Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, he uses music to imagine unthought futures, asking questions about existence and the ways we make spaces habitable. 

Dr. Bryson is a professor of French and Francophone studies and Gender and Women's studies in the global studies program at Illinois College. He has published work in Research in African Literatures, the Journal of the African Literature Association, Black Camera, and African Studies Review. His research focuses on the cultural, cinematic, and literary practices and products from Francophone Africa, especially Senegal, and how those practices and products circulate locally and globally to reconfigure conceptualizations of African people, spaces, and relations.

Dr. Enz is a distinguished professor of French and global studies at South Dakota State University. Her research focuses on Francophone literature and cinema from West Africa and the Caribbean. She has published articles in Black Camera, African Studies Quarterly, the Journal of the African Literature Association, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, the French Review, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

In Projections of Dakar: (Re)Imagining Urban Senegal through Cinema, the discussion for this conversation, Dr. Bryson and Dr. Enz illustrate how Senegalese filmmakers reimagine Africa as a place that will lead to a better future for its inhabitants.

His first book, the topic for this discussion, The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850 (Ohio University Press New African History Series, 2024), explores questions of state-making, social hierarchy and self-making across parts of Mali, Senegal and Guinea through the lens of textiles and dress in a context shaped by an emergent global capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. 
Prof. Benjamin’s scholarship interrogates the multiple connections between west African, African diaspora and global histories through the lens of material culture, technology, labor, gender and race in order to reshape how historians think about western Africa’s role in the history of global capitalism and its connections to contemporary questions of global inequality. 

Prior to Howard University, Dr. Benjamin taught at the University of California, Riverside. From 2021-2023, he was the Principal Investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Unarchiving Blackness” exploring archival practices in African and African Diaspora Studies. Dr. Benjamin’s work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. She is the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in academic publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology, as well as the news-oriented The Conversation. In this discussion, we explore her most recent work Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024). Dr. Shukla argues that cosmopolitanism and racial belonging need not be seen as contradictory. Cross-Cultural Harlem offers a vision of sustained dialogue to respond to the challenges of urban transformations and to affirm the future of Harlem as actual place and global symbol.

Today’s conversation is with Mary Hicks, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches the history of the Black Atlantic and Latin America. Her research has been published in Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Global Slavery, and a number of collections on slavery, the Atlantic world, and the meaning of Black history. She is the author of Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2025 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the adventurous and curious character of archival research, the complexity of telling historical stories, and the significance of Captive Cosmopolitans for thinking about contemporary Black life.

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.

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.

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. 

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.  

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. 

Today’s discussion is with Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Afro American Studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C.  In addition to a number articles in scholarly journals and popular intellectual venues, he has written three books: We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989, published with New York University Press in 2019, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, published with Polity Press in 2021, and the book that occasions our conversation today: Of Black Study, published with Pluto Press in 2023.

Today’s discussion is with Autumn Womack, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where she teaches and writes on 19th and early 20th century African American literature and cultural history and where she has worked as part of the curatorial team at the Toni Morrison Papers project. She is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals as well as popular intellectual venues including LA Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. Autumn is the author of the book The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930, which is the occasion for our conversation that follows. The book was published by University of Chicago Press in 2022 and was the winner of the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize in 2023.

Method, and the Africa Is A Country blog, among others. Dr. Deets serves as a book review editor for The Journal of West African History. He moved to Cairo in 2017 after obtaining his PhD in African history at Cornell University. He embarked on this academic career after 20

years as a helicopter pilot and a military diplomat in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a military attaché to the West African countries of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mauritania. In his final military assignment, Dr. Deets returned to his undergraduate alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, to teach History and to serve as the varsity wrestling officer representative. Dr. Deets grew up in the small town of Beloit, Kansas.

Dr. Nwokocha is currently working on her second book project which is tentatively entitled: “‘Tell My Spirit’: Black Queer Women in Haitian Vodou,” which investigates Black queer women’s interactions with Haitian Vodou divinities, their performance of ritual work, and their formation

of religious communities in multiple locations including Montréal, Canada; Miami, Florida; Havana, Cuba; Paris, France; Brooklyn, New York, and Northern California. Nwokocha has been featured in the Journal of Haitian Studies, Harvard Divinity Bulletin Magazine, Reading Religion, and Women Studies Quarterly.

Today’s discussion is with Drew Dalton, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Dominican University in Chicago, Illinois where he currently serves as chair of the department. He is the author of numerous articles in European philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and phenomenology, as well as three authored books: Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire, published in 2009 by Duquesne University Press, The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute with Bloomsbury in 2018, and the just out book The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Reason to Ethical Pessimism with Northwestern University Press, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the relationship between material science and metaphysics, the relation between metaphysics and ethical sensibility, as well as the place of pessimism in our ethical, existential, and political thinking. A link to the online essay mentioned at the close of the podcast is here: "The Beautiful Pessimism of Jimmy Buffett" in The Conversation.

In this podcast, we discuss the cover photograph “Denver” by Xaviera Simmons. Simmons’ biography and overview of work can be seen here at the Guggenheim website.

We also discuss the artist Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, whose painting Creature of the Grey Lagoon is on the book’s cover and whose work can be explored at https://www.amaryllisdejesusmoleski.com

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.

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. 

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.

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.

 
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.

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.

A discussion with Diane Exavier, a writer, theater-maker, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY, about her new poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix, published in November 2021 by The 3rd Thing Press. Diane works across genres and geographies in this collection, making sense of what she calls the 4L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Her poetry, theater snippets, and thought pieces have appeared in The Atlas Review, The Racial Imaginary: Black Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, and other publications, and in 2017 she published the chapbook Teaches of Peaches. In our conversation that follows, we discuss the origins of the project The Math of Saint Felix, its composition in sound and word, and the place of grief, mourning, remembrance, and beauty in poetry and poetics.

This discussion is with Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. He has published widely in popular and academic outlets on theology, political theory, and philosophy, with particular emphasis on politics and the history of Christian thought. Adam has authored ten books, including recent works The Prince of this World in 2016 and Neoliberalism’s Demons in 2018, both with Stanford University Press, and 2020’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory with Edinburgh University Press. His new book, which is our occasion for conversation today, is titled What is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life, published in late-2021 by Fordham University Press.

Today’s discussion is with Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has written and published in both academic and popular venues on issues of racial capitalism, climate justice, and the legacy of colonialism in our political thinking and practices. He is the author of Elite Capture, forthcoming with Haymarket Books, and Reconsidering Reparations, published by Oxford University Press in early 2022 and which we are discussing today.

Together, Goudsouzian and McKinney edited the 2018 collection An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, published by University of Kentucky Press, which we discuss in this episode. 

You can read about her current projects at her personal website (http://www.yomairafigueroa.com), as well as ongoing curatorial work at the website for Electric Marronage. To view the Knowledge Unlatched (open access) edition of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, visit https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/49666.

Kris Sealey teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. She has published widely in European philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophical questions arising from racialized experience in the Americas, and anti- and de-colonial theory in the black Atlantic. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence was published in 2013 by State University of New York Press, and her second book, which is the topic of this conversation, was published in 2020 by Northwestern University Press and is titled Creolizing the Nation.

The opening poem "Nothing to Declare," read by Kris Sealey, was written Lauren K. Alleyne. Many thanks to the poet for permission to include this reading of her gorgeous, evocative poem.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a literary critic and scholar of world literature who teaches in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. She has published extensively on African literature, philosophy, and politics in both scholarly and popular venues. Her first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, is a compelling comparative study, creating intellectual space within which it is possible to connect the motifs and imperatives of 19th century Russian realist literature to the literature of South Africa in the apartheid era and postcolonial moment. Her new book, which is under discussion in the conversation, was published in early 2021 with Princeton University Press and is titled The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing.

Geo Maher teaches in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. He is the author of numerous articles in academic venues, as well as popular and radical political media. He has written five books: ‘We Created Chavez’: A People’s History of the Bolivarian Revolution and Decolonizing Dialectics, both with Duke University Press, and with Verso he has published Building the Commune and A World Without Police. Anticolonial Eruptions is forthcoming with University of California Press in late-March 2022.

Zeyad el Nabolsy is a doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he works on African iterations of philosophy, culture, and Marxism in a continental and global intellectual context and has authored a piece on political economy and African philosophy for the volume under discussion. Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, the author of the volume’s Afterword, is Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick and writes on philosophy and cultural theory with particular emphasis on francophone Africa, including Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960, which was published in 2021 by Liverpool University Press. Grant Farred, the editor of Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, where he writes and teaches philosophy, cultural studies, and literature in a black Atlantic context. Grant is the author of a number of books, including most recently An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America, published by University of Minnesota in late 2021.

Kevin Thompson teaches in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, where he publishes widely in 19th and 20th century European thought and is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Normativity (Northwestern 2019). Perry Zurn teaches in the Department of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. and has written extensively on themes of curiosity, prison abolition, Foucault’s critical theory, and is the author of the book Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (Minnesota 2021).