Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Amber Jamilla Musser [https://www.amberjamillamusser.com/], a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center [https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/amber-musser]. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024).

This discussion is with Philip Janzen, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Florida. He studies the cultural and intellectual histories linking Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean [https://www.dukeupress.edu/an-unformed-map], published by Duke University Press in 2025. His research has also appeared in the American Historical Review [https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/127/2/755/6705161], The Journal of African History [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/tensions-on-the-railway-west-indians-colonial-hierarchies-and-the-language-of-racial-unity-in-west-africa/E9285F738F964F517DB5B6927FA9C1D5], and the Journal of Social History [https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/58/2/291/7726386].

This episode includes discussions of suicide within the historical contexts of slavery, colonization, and empire. Please listen with care and be mindful of your well-being as you engage with this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis or struggling, you are not alone. Support is available through the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or by texting TALK to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. Thank you and please make sure to take care of yourself. This discussion is with Dr. Doyle D. Calhoun [https://www.pet.cam.ac.uk/person/dr-doyle-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 [https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-suicide-archive] 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.

This discussion is with Dr. Therí A. Pickens [https://www.tpickens.org/] received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (P’05) and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA (2010).  She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. In today’s conversation, we discuss her debut poetry collection What Had Happened Was [https://www.dukeupress.edu/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.

This discussion is with Dr. Jessie Cox [https://music.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/jessie-cox/], an Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph, the topic of this conversation, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices [https://www.dukeupress.edu/sounds-of-black-switzerland] (Duke UP, 2025) addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.  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.