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Conversations in Atlantic Theory: Daily Summaries Delivered
by 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.
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- 4 days ago1h 5m
Stacey A. Langwick on Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World
Stacey Langwick, MPH, PhD, is a cultural and medical anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her research, writing, teaching and program building have focused on healing, medicine and the body in East Africa. She is author of Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (2011) and co-editor of Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Africa (2012). Her articles and essays have appeared in American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Science, Technology and Human Values, and Medical Anthropology, as well as a number of edited volumes. Her work is driven by a conviction that struggles over health are simultaneous struggles over the politics of knowledge, questions of evidence, and possibilities of care. Most recently, her work has taken up these themes through a range of interlocking issues including the science of traditional medicine in Africa, the afterlives of botanical colonization, the problem of toxicity, the politics of intellectual property, questions of bodily and territorial sovereignty, the work of chronicity and the rise chronic disease, and the possibilities of gardens as sites of medical education. In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph, Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing and Sovereignty in a Toxic World (2026) where she examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Medicines That Feed Us examines the Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world.Currently, Langwick is experimenting with ways in which anthropology might fuel experiments in healing (as) land relations. I co-founded the Uzima Collective, which brings together diverse scholars, medical professionals, and community leaders from both Tanzania and the United States to reimagine healing in the face of intertwined environmental and health challenges. At the heart of this work is a two-acre anticolonial teaching, research, and healing garden at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center—a space for medical training, patient care, and collective repletion, inspiration, and healing. In an interlinked project with the Tanzanian non-governmental organization TRMEGA (Training, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation on Gender and AIDS), she is exploring what it means to "eat well" amid rising rates of chronic disease, climate change, expanding social inequality, and the intensification of property regimes that support the enclosure of land and plant life.
- 3 weeks ago40 min
Eric C. Rath on Kanpai: The History of Sake
Dr. Eric C. Rath is a professor of history at the University of Kansas where he teaches courses on food history and premodern Japan. A leading specialist in Japanese food culture, Dr. Rath has authored more than thirty articles on Japanese food culture from ancient to modern times covering the history of food rituals, heirloom vegetables, confectionery, restaurants, tableware, and eating competitions. His books include Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (2010), Japanese Foodways Past and Present coedited with Stephanie Assmann (2010), Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity (2016), and Oishii: The History of Sushi (2021). He is on the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Food Studies and is a founding member of the editorial collective of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. He has written for the popular publications Sake Today and The Sake Times. His recent monograph, the topic for today’s conversation, Kanpai: The History of Sake (Reaktion Books, 2025), is the first history of sake in English, exploring its evolution from homebrew to flavored varieties, and its cultural significance and global rise—including its growing popularity and production in North America and Europe.
- May 5, 202654 min
Lauren Derby on Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
Dr. Lauren (Robin) Derby’s research has treated dictatorship and everyday life, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican border, and how notions of race, national identity and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food and animals. Her publications include the prize-winning The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo, the co-authored Terreur de frontière: le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937 (Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2021) and the co-edited Dominican Republic Reader (Duke University Press, 2014). She is Bradford Burns Chair of Latin American history at UCLA where she teaches courses on modern Latin America and Caribbean history, cultural history and food studies. The focus of today’s conversation is her latest monograph, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2025). In this work, Dr. Derby examines storytelling traditions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, centering on shape-shifting spirit figures known as baka or bacá, and exploring how they embody layered histories of race, religion, repression, and resistance.
- Apr 28, 20261h 15m
Chelsi West Ohueri on Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife
Dr. Chelsi West Ohueri is a sociocultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research throughout Albania and the Balkan region, and in the US South. 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.
- Apr 21, 202652 min
Samuele Collu on Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition
Dr. Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research examines the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices. He is currently completing Dreams I Scroll Through, an experimental ethnography immersing the reader in a (mildly psychedelic) social media binge-scroll. Collu is also working on a project titled “Force and Form,” which focuses on learning, trauma, and internal alchemy practices in Montréal.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.
- Apr 7, 202652 min
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.
- Mar 31, 20261h 6m
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.
- Mar 24, 20261h 1m
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.
About Conversations in Atlantic Theory
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.
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