This discussion is with Dr. 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 (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.

This discussion is with Dr. Devin Bryson and Dr. Molly Enz.

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.

This discussion is with Dr. Jody Benjamin, a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. He received his PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2016. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the colonial archive.

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.