Joshua Myers – författare

'This magnificent book is the best recent treatment we have of the great Black Radical Tradition' - Cornel WestOf Black Study explores how the ideas of Black intellectuals generated 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.

Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian, and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century. In this powerful work, the first major book to tell his story, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson’s work interrogated the foundations of western political thought, modern capitalism, and changing meanings of race.Tracing the course of Robinson’s journey from his early days as an agitator in the 1960s to his publication of such seminal works as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson’s mission as aiming to understand and practice opposition to “the terms of order.” In so doing, Robinson excavated the Black Radical tradition as a form of resistance that imagined that life on wholly different terms was possible.In the era of Black Lives Matter, that resistance is as necessary as ever, and Robinson’s contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.