Joshua Myers

Of Black Study explores how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom.

Joshua Myers explores the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logics of academic disciplinarity. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, the book focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.

Especially geared toward understanding the contemporary evolution of Black Studies in the neoliberal university, Of Black Study allows us to consider the stakes of intellectual freedom and the path toward a new world.

Joshua Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition and We are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Protest of 1989.

This event will be chaired by Minkah Makalani. Makalani is the Director of the Center for Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He works in Black political thought, intellectual history, and the Black radical tradition in the Caribbean and U.S. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 and co-editor (with Davarian Baldwin) of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem.