Of Black Study

by Joshua Myers

An exploration of the ways that Black intellectuals arrived at a critique of Western knowledge Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom.

Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study 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 and allows us to consider the stakes of intellectual freedom and the path toward a new world.

Genres: Race, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Education

280 pages, Paperback

Published January 20, 2022

Reviews

[shemauky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What if disorder is not chaos?

For what if life was rhythm”

Dr. Myers offers a project that, of itself, is worthy of study.

Beyond a linear trajectory and within the black radical tradition, Josh orchestrates a flow of thinkers and their contributions in a way that is of utility in the here and now and in space and time to come.

Suggestion: read this with others. watch his youtube and podcasts talks on it. Trust what you feel even if and when you think you don’t “know”.

[Ife · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 60s, on the heels of the civil rights movement, Black studies departments started popping up in universities all across America. These interdisciplinary curricula had radical pre-civil rights origins, starting from Black academics who were among few to be educated within top white institutions, and then went into Historically Black Colleges and Universities to engage in alchemical intellectual thought, questioning “the master’s tools”, and creating what Robinson would later call The Black Radical Tradition. Crackdowns on communism and Black radicalism at HBCUs would rock this foundation, and as the civil rights created a new urgency to study the Black experience in America, Black studies began its strange affair with the white American university.

As Myers and others have argued, the introduction of Black Radical Thought into white American institutions necessitated the erasure of the ‘radical’. The very architectonics of Black studies economics, sociology, history etc. became indistinguishable from white economics, sociology, history. But why do Black people get their own economics? Is there not one way to do sociology, history, anthropology? Herein lies Myers intervention. Myers demonstrates, following Sylvia Wynter, that the methodologies that became so firmly codified in various white humanities, and were then bequeathed onto their Black studies counterparts, were either shaped by the normative idea of the Human which rendered Black people as freak variables to be controlled, or were explicitly anti-Black. Through eloquent and powerful academic synthesis Myers provides an achronological archive of four Black thinkers who departed from institutional thinking and strove to move closer to a consummate Black studies.

He theorizes Hesitation as a sort of orientation that Du Bois had to normative Spencerian and Comtean sociology:

Hesitation is a creative force. To hesitate is to pause and to consider. It is not merely not knowing, or the absolute state of being unsure. Rather, it is being sure that we can only be unsure of a certain kind of sureness, a certain kind of closure. Space must be created to make sure we do not close off other kinds of possibilities. So, hesitation is a moment of both refusal and imagination. It is never one or the other. But it is not closure. Hesitance is not the achievement of resolution. Resolution is only possible when a destination is chosen, a route taken. Hesitation is a break that nevertheless allows us to remain open, listening for what can be. For what has never been.

To me it’s unclear if there’s a difference between hesitation here and general scepticism but I enjoyed his summary of Du Bois’ relevance and positioning at the historical wedding of industry to sociological mechanisms which sought to ask not whether Black people were inferior, but whether they were controllable.

Next he takes on Wynter, who it would appear his work is most indebted to. He abridges her writing on the effects of the church-knowledge split during the Renaissance producing the Cartesian free-subject, the Man upon which the Humanities was built. His work here seems more closely attuned to Wynter’s biography than earlier with Dubois and I liked the exploration of how her literary project The Hills of Hebron was also a part of her intellectual project, not something separate.

Chapter 3 was a challenge for me, not only because it is the driest in terms of writing, but because it centred the work of Jacob H. Carruthers and his Black reimagining of history introducing Afrocentricity. To put it in terms that Janet Halley might use, Afrocentricity negatively triggers my political libido – it politically turns me off. Many Afrocentric historians are slapdash on historical detail and interpretation. Moreover, I had a brief Afrocentric phase that I look back on and cringe. Yet I think about Myer’s use of the The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story earlier in the introduction of the book, which is not an Afrocentric text but similarly sought to centre slavery and Black Americans in American history and the reception of which gets at the core of how History seems to be a particularly hard field of knowledge to free from its white trappings. History that inappropriately excludes the contributions of Black people to, and effects on Black people of historical events is rarely critiqued for lacking objectivity. History, as many people are unaware, is primarily a matter of interpreting historical events and not the excavation of an objective knowledge of what happened in the past. So therefore why should one have such a negative reaction to histories of the world that interpretatively centre Africa and its descended peoples. I will however need to revisit this chapter to be fully open to what it has to say.

The last chapter brings in the work of Robinson on rethinking the idea of ‘Order’ and its concomitant persuasions of ‘peace’, ‘peaceful protest’ etc. I think the central idea of the chapter is beautifully summed up in my favourite paragraph in the book:

But what if disorder is not chaos? What if the word given as order’s opposite does not capture how human beings make sense of the patterns, rhythms, and ways of meaning-making that give them a sense of their lives? What if order nominates and labels these otherwise ways of being as disorder in order to remain in control? What if management, containment, resolution—and all the things we think of when we assume the idea of order—is not order? What if this “stability” is what is producing something we should rightly call chaotic? Something that appears to us not as “justice” but as terror? What if this order is unstable, unwieldy, driven by violent political activities and exclusive social groundings? And perhaps most importantly, what if there is a conception of reality that lies outside of this dyad, this duality?

Of Black Study raises difficult philosophical questions such as how might we begin the think Black? How do we think of “Black studies as Life studies”? It asks us to ‘unsettle the coloniality’ of the current academic Black study and divorce it from its white methodologies. Even if you don’t agree with everything Myers says and you’re still swear by the conventional methodology of certain disciplines, this book will give you much to think about.

Referenced: The History of Black Studies

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

“[T]he particular struggle for black culture of the Americas – the counter-culture of the piezas [Black Africans referred to as a pieza/measure of exchange when sold then Negro] – takes on universal dimensions. For the rationality of the paradigm of material production – of which the piezas on the plantation were the first mass victims – has extended itself globally... never before have such large masses of people experienced themselves as being both materially and psychically dispossessed... even the materially affluent, or, at least, well fed consumers – as, for example in the case of the youth of the developed world, the psychic dispossession of those who feel themselves helpless pawns – piezas – in an order whose very productive rationality can leave no room for their human fulfilment/self-realisation, that the radicality of Marley's demand to love life and live that's all – joins forces with the conjoined demand for bread, fulfilment, and self-realisation rising up from the shantytowns, the inner city ghettoes, the favelas; from all the lumpen, in fact and spirit.

For this is a new form of the original piezas Middle Passage experience which links us all now, therefore, on the basis of a shared commonality of experience in which we all now find ourselves the new nameless, experience ourselves as the undifferentiated statistics of interchangeable producer-consumer units – here to increase the sale of Coca Cola or of Geritol, or alternatively, how to figure in the master plan of a techno-bureaucrat. This given that as the power of the Free-Market economic (U.S.A.) and the politico-statal (Soviet Union) processes of decision-making are processes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a large majority of mankind begin to experience ourselves as merely consumers; as, therefore, the very negation of the I, as piezas cast adrift – without any anchor in a realised sense of self – in the contemporary world of Western and Westernised, therefore hegemonically secular, techno-industrial modernity.

St. Clair Drake has analysed the process by which in the context of the original Middle Passage, the individual/tribal African slave was to be, on arrival in the New World expropriated of the former cultural signifying system whose symbolic coding had formerly constituted him, even where a slave, as a "human" rather than as not a merely "biological" being…

…It is therefore against this process of reduction to nigger, thereby, to ultimate non-human status, that we must attempt to grasp the revolutionary significance of that counter-invention of the self – which I see as the central and universally applicable strategy of the "politics of black culture”” (Wynter, 2022, p. 483-484).

In the summer of 2020 I found myself unexpectedly home in Hawaiʻi 2 years before I expected to return, the world subject to a pandemic and the United States in an upheaval after the continued police killings that repeated what had led to the creation of Black Lives Matter years earlier. After these events I felt I, as a white American, needed to read more about Black history, the Black Radical Tradition, and other works that could help one to understand the world and how to change it. A recent convert to communism, I began reading Cedric Robinson’s work, such as Black Marxism and Anthropology of Marxism. Though I read these and other books, it wasn’t until I began reading Sylvia Wynter last year that I began to understand how, as she makes clear, the Black struggle was central understanding all other struggles, including the anticolonial, queer, trans & women’s lib (Wynter, 2003, p. 260-263). As Wynter puts it: “The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves” (Wynter, 2003, p. 260).

Joshua Myers, in his incredible book on Black Study and Black Studies looks at Wynter and other Black scholars who recognized that Black Studies wasn’t just a discipline that could fit into the academy like other new disciplines would after it (e.g. Lesbian and Gay/Queer studies, Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, etc., all of which suffer from institutionalization, disciplinarity, and dogmatism (cf. Wynter, 2006, p. 112-113)). In the Introduction Myers draws inspiration from June Jordan in articulating the stakes and the meaning of Black studies:

“struggle for a Black writing, free of a white gaze emerged from Black spaces and was affirmed in Black spaces. Black Studies was such a Black space. And this meant something much more profound than the racialized signifier of “Black” that was violently created to order human groups. It was about experience. There was the lie, and then there was life—living. This struggle for life was oriented toward a declaration, synthesized beautifully by Jordan’s poetic invocation: “We are the Truth: We are the living Black experience, and therefore, we are the primary sources of information. For us, there is nothing optional about Black Experience and/or ‘Black Studies’: we must know ourselves” (Myers, Kindle Loc 115).

Just as the Rastafari came to consciousness where they could understand the lies of Babylon and the “politricks” that keep people from being free (see first guide quote essay), so does Black studies allow us to break free from the dominant orders and their psychological grip on politics, economics, culture, and other areas of human life, communal living and cognition. The dominant order and its benefactors, however, reinforce the normative understandings that keep in place the disciplines and the disciplined. In his book, Myers presents the reader with 4 chapters of intellectual biographies of Black studies scholars, namely W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson, bookended by an introduction and conclusion that bring us together and leave us thinking with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara respectively. Their life stories and struggles against the world order that circumscribed the thinkable and enactable provide incredible examples of what people have done to think and act critically in response to limitations and to be more alive; each section provides citations and elaborations of numerous articles and works of the people considered, and I found myself reading some of June Jordan's work, W.E.B. Du Bois' Sociology Hesitant and Jacob Carruthers' MDW NTR (a must read!) before continuing through each chapter book.

This book should be read by all people who want to, as June Jordan said, "know ourselves," as Black people and as people whose lives and societies are structured by anti-Black racism, racial regimes and "terms of order" that exclude alternative forms of knowledge and more ecumenical ways of being human and coexisting on this planet. When Sylvia Wynter wrote in the third quote above "the human species itself/ourselves," the referent empatic pronoun is not limited to the grammatical and suppositional "itself" of the human species, because that species is our We. Elsewhere when she does this, (e.g., "themselves/ourselves"), she points out how we are all part of a larger We, we-the-ecumenically-human, that even if people aren't Black they need to learn from the Black experience as human experience in a radical way that helps us understand our true interconnectedness and species being Homo narrans, a storytelling species that can retell our origins and futures.

I never finished reading all of Cedric Robinson's work before reading this book. Myers, Robinson's biographer, wrote eloquently about Robinson's life and thought in chapter 4 of this book. The following quote made me understand what I first read in Black Marxism and his other works, what Robinson meant by the Black Radical Tradition, what it means for Black peoples today and what's needed of Black Study and the study all of us do to understand the world so we can change it.

"Cedric Robinson’s Black Study was a critique of Western civilization, but it was not simply that. Just as the Black radical tradition was a “negation of Western civilization but not in the direct sense of a simple dialectical negation,” Robinson did not critique the West to simply negate its negation. There was another component to his work, one that created space for us to see ourselves anew, for “black radicalism” could not “be understood within the particular context of its genesis.” Robinson’s work imagined the West as the conceptual interdiction of a way of being in the world, a way that “specifically” characterized African life. Being whole required that we understand and ultimately subvert this interdiction, to recover this way, to truly arrive at a comprehension of this Relation. Only a reading of all of his works together will get us here. But such a reading would necessarily need to be understood as a product of an intellectual genealogy—not ironically, the very genealogy Robinson narrates in Black Marxism and in other writings. In this intellectual work, Black Study is an ongoing tradition of resistance and a way of conceiving it. So, then, is the collective intelligence of the Black Radical tradition that it extends” (Myers, Kindle loc 3078).

While Myers is describing specifically "African life" that was interdicted, the proposition that "being whole required that we understand and ultimately subvert this interdiction, to recover this way, to truly arrive at a comprehension of this Relation" is a proposition that, following Sylvia Wynter's quote that opened this review and her work towards an "ecumenical humanism" based on Fanon's socio-cultural scientific revolution of sociogeny based on his study of African life, antiblack racism and humanism, we can see what we all need to be whole and "ecumenically human" (cf. Wynter, 2015) outside the current world order. This book is one entry into the break and beyond.

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P.S. Although cited in the book, Édouard Glissant wasn't mentioned outside the footnotes; while this is understandable, I recommend him in addition to the other thinkers Myers included in his book. His œuvre is almost completely translated, with multiple books having been translated in the past 4 years. I highly recommend his A New Region of the World, The Baton Rouge Interviews, and Les Indes. For a critical examination of his philosophy, see Édouard Glissant: Philosopher by Alexandre Leupin (who interviewed Glissant for The Baton Rouge Interviews).


Sources of quotes:
Wynter, S. (2022 [1977]). “We Know Where We’re From” The Politics of Black Culture From Myal to Marley. In Wynter, S. We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Decolonising Essays 1967-1984 (pp. 456-499). Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. (Original work presented in 1977).

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337.

Wynter, S. (2006). On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project. In L.R. Gordon & J.A. Gordon (Eds.) Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (pp. 107-169), New York: Routledge.

(Wynter’s work available on Monoskop(dot)org/Sylvia_Wynter

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a lot of academic books before, and usually, they’re not the kind you read front to back. You pick them up and put them down as you go along, dipping into sections that speak to you. But Black Studies by Joshua Myers-Lipton was one of the first academic books I really enjoyed reading straight through.

What stood out is how he traces the history of Black Studies, especially in America, and its complex relationship with predominantly white institutions. He doesn’t shy away from showing how Black Studies challenged mainstream academia and the ways white people and power structures tried to control or dismiss this knowledge. Even though the book focuses on the US context, the ideas about knowledge, resistance, and reclaiming Black narratives hit close to home.

While it doesn’t specifically talk about the Black experience in Britain, I found the discussions around power, identity, and academic struggle relatable, given the global conversations around race and representation.

This book made me think differently about how Black history and culture are studied and preserved and why it matters so much that we keep pushing for spaces where Black voices are centred on their own terms.