S2E5: This Is Actually Serious w/Joshua Myers
In this essential Black History Month conversation, Stone Written host Dr. Rhon sits down with Dr. Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University and author of Of Black Study, to reflect on what Black intellectual traditions offer in our current political moment. Recorded in December 2024 but strikingly resonant today, the episode explores Black Studies not as abstraction or nostalgia, but as preparation for living, struggling, and organizing through crisis.
Grounded in the wisdom of ancestors such as June Jordan and Cedric Robinson, the episode interrogates the myths surrounding Black presence in the academy and calls for solidarity networks rooted in trust rather than transaction. Dr. Myers reminds us that Black Study lives everywhere—in our labor, our creativity, our relationships—and remains essential for navigating crisis toward collective liberation.
Sources:
* Select works by Joshua Myers: Of Black Study [https://www.plutobooks.com/product/of-black-study/] (Pluto Press, 2023); Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition [https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=cedric-robinson-the-time-of-the-black-radical-tradition--9781509537914] (Polity, 2021); We are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 [https://nyupress.org/9781479811755/we-are-worth-fighting-for/] (NYU Press, 2019); A Gathering Together [https://www.agatheringtogether.com/] (literary journal)
* Select texts mentioned in the episode: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition [https://uncpress.org/9781469663722/black-marxism-revised-and-updated-third-edition/], 3rd edition (UNC Press, 2021); Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/in-search-of-the-black-fantastic-9780195178463?cc=us&lang=en&#:~:text=--Robert%20Gooding-Williams%2C%20Ralph%20and%20Mary%20Otis%20Isham,Center%20for%20African%20American%20Studies%2C%20Princeton%20University.] (Oxford University Press, 2008); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p079641] (Illinois Press, 2013); Anna Julia Cooper, A Vice from teh South; Erica R. Edwards, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire [https://nyupress.org/9781479808434/the-other-side-of-terror/] (NYU Press, 2021); June Jordan, “Bringing Back the Person,” in Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from the Progressive, [https://litwinbooks.com/books/life-as-activism/] edited by Stacy Russo with a Foreword by Angela Davis (Litwin Books, 2014).
* Additional source: SNCC Legacy Project [https://sncclegacyproject.org/]
