BOOKS

Holy Ghost Key

Broadside Lotus Press, 2024
Winner of the 2023 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize

Joshua Myers's Holy Ghost Key celebrates the essential role of African music in the continuity and sustenance of African Diasporic life and culture. Myers weaves his broad knowledge of African and African American music practices, genres and instruments with his memory of gospel lyrics and symbols evoking African spirituality, showing us the ways in which this music has been both the light on our path and the grounding of our historic journey. Though many of the poems pay tribute to the genius of contemporary musicians who have won popular acclaim, the entire collection reminds of a persistent African ancestral legacy.

Of Black Study

Pluto Press, 2023

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.

Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition

Polity Press, 2021

Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century, whose work resonates deeply with contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter.

In this powerful work, the first major book to tell the story of Cedric Robinson, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson's work interrogated the foundations of Western political thought, modern capitalism, and the changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson's journey from his early days as an agitator in the 60s against the US's reactionary foreign policy to his publication of such seminal works within Black Studies as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson's mission as one that aimed to understand and practise resistance 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.

As the USA enters the 20s, the need to continue that resistance is as clear as ever, and Robinson's contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.

We are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Protest of 1989

New York University Press, 2019

We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos.

At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s.

Interview with Black Agenda Report.

Selected Academic Articles

“No-Spaces and Returns.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 46 (March 2023): 110-14.

“A Black Thang: Black Nia F.O.R.C.E, Radical Student Reading Circles, and Intellectual Freedom.” Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies 6 (2022): 29-43.

“Out of the Cauldron: Lessons from Cedric Robinson.” Race and Class 63 (2022): 3-21.

“A Mosquito on an Elephant’s Behind: The Third World News Review and Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson’s Community Media.” Journal of Academic Freedom 12 (Fall 2021)

“Organizing Howard.” Washington History 32 (Fall 2020): 49-51.

“The Order of Disciplinarity, The Terms of Silence.” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal 3 (Spring 2018): 107-29.

“W.E.B. Du Bois and African Deep Thought; or a Belief in Life.” African Journal of Rhetoric 8 (2016): 305-321.

“Representations of Struggle: The Rule(s) of Law and Black Lawyering Traditions: A Review Essay.” Human Rights and Globalization Law Review 6 (Fall 2015-Spring 2016): 51-59.

“Racial Economies of Academia: Africana Studies as Arbiter.” Journal of African American Studies 19, no.1 (March 2015): 79-90.