Joshua Myers presents "Of Black Study" in conversation w/Minkah Makalani

Joshua Myers presents "Of Black Study" in conversation w/Minkah Makalani

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Thursday, May 11th 2023
7:00 pm
Red Emma's
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 M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Of Black Study (Pluto, 2023), Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021), and We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019), as well as the editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.

His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, musics, and foodways as well as critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Washington History, The Journal of Academic Freedom, The Journal of African American Studies,The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Downbeat, The New Inquiry , Pambazuka, _Obsidian, _and _Burning House Press, _among other literary spaces.

In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he is the senior content producer at the Africa World Now Project, and served as the co-coordinator of the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles Oral History Project and as an organizer with Washington DC’s Positive Black Folks in Action.

A central thread that guides all of this work is an approach to knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely interprets what is around us, but can transform and renew these spaces we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.

Minkah 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 (UNC Press, 2011) and co-editor (with Davarian Baldwin) of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (Minnesota, 2013).

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