This is Fatima Seck and today’s discussion is with Dr. Danielle Roper, an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago from Kingston, Jamaica. She is also the curator of the digital exhibit: Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive. She is from Kingston, Jamaica.

In this conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas. Dr. Roper examines blackface performance and its relationship to twentieth- and twenty-first-century nationalist fictions of mestizaje, creole nationalism, and other versions of postracialism in the Americas.

This discussion is with Amber Jamilla Musser, a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. 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, published by Duke University Press in 2025. His research has also appeared in the American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, and the Journal of Social History.