Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

BAR Book Forum: Joshua Myers’ Book, “Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
20 Oct 2021
BAR Book Forum: Joshua Myers’ Book, “Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition”
BAR Book Forum: Joshua Myers’ Book, “Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Joshua Myers. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. His book is Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Joshua Myers: I think the current political and social climate is the product of something more entrenched than even the categories of “social” and “political” can fully reveal. Cedric Robinson’s work has taught us that what passes as the social and political order is rooted historically and philosophically in conceptual and material processes that necessarily produce this climate, or The Weather, to use Christina Sharpe’s term. Said another way, the crises we see in today’s climate are inherent to the very idea and construction of the social and political systems and the ways that they have been updated or adapted to fit the requirements of capitalism and imperialism over the last several centuries. To render human life and movement through market logics is to produce a crisis and a climate that makes the entire planet vulnerable—even as billionaires attempt to spread these logics throughout the universe. In my book, I try to arrive at something of an understanding of how Cedric Robinson wrote about these larger questions, so we can see that the climate at any given point (i.e. “today), is not simply a temporary blip in an otherwise perfectible system and way of being in the world. We will have to think with the social and the political, but only in order to think a world beyond them.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

The urgency of organizing, it seems, never ceases. There is always something. We must ensure that we are always prepared to allow those elements of resistance to shape who and what we organize for. In the book, I write about Cedric Robinson’s life, which began as an organizer, and it was that organizing that directly led to the theoretical work that he would accomplish as a scholar. Though I believe that the distinctions drawn between theory and praxis reflect a Western philosophical conception that has done harm, I also believe that too often we repeat or reify that notion when it comes to thinking Black radicalism. Robinson’s life can help us break out of that if we listen closely. The organizing never stopped. Neither did the thinking. The urgency of organizing can never justify the absence of thinking through who we must be as part of an expansive notion of the Black Radical tradition. Ultimately, Robinson was after—and we must continue to be after— a kind of excavation of human consciousness as the most important form of resisting the forces of racial capitalism and the various evils it spawned. If we can know more about who we were in relationship to what the structures of oppression imagine us to be, we can know more about who we must be now, and what we must be now. For that question is what animates the spirit of movement and resistance.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

Given the prominence of Cedric Robinson’s name in the past five or six years, I hope that readers will un-learn that he was far more than one or two chapters of his most well-known book, Black Marxism. I hope that readers will un-learn that one’s embrace of his work must forever and always hinge on their acceptance of the premise of those one or two chapters. Because Black Marxism itself comes out of a context that is important to understand. At the same time, that work is both more than that context and that work is more than just that book. Once we get beyond the singularity of Robinson as theorist of racial capitalism or Robinson as coiner of this or that term, we can actually embrace the spirit of the thing animating his work. It is not a theoretical intervention that drew me to his work, it was a relation to our people’s lives and struggles. Black life is full and in the pages of Robinson’s work we sense and feel that fullness. This may be a hard sell for many, but that’s what I wanted to accomplish in this text. It would have been easy to write a treatise challenging all the misconceptions—for there are many—and I fall into that trap at certain points in the text. But behind every misconception is a conception. And if we would only get at that…

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

Well, Cedric Robinson, of course. In the end, Cedric Robinson, the person became more important for me to understand, because his sense of generosity and openness is reflected in the spiritual embrace of Black radicalism that is present in the work. So I could not really feel my way through the writing without that presence in my mind and heart. The writing in fact flowed more easily when I relinquished the academic form and posture of representation and evidence and just gave myself the freedom to be open to what I heard him saying. If we are not doing this in Black Studies, we end up missing a lot. So that inspiration is there. And because it is there, the work does not always center him. He would not have centered himself. In fact, the whole notion of centering anything becomes fraught. But what is foremost is the tradition. I think of the 2006 Nas record, “Carry on Tradition,” where he writes in the hook “when you rep what we rep/then carry on tradition.” It’s a perfect reading of the task of knowing what we are and whose we are and what to do. We are only the carriers. An important and essential job, but not more important than the thing being carried.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

The anti-Blackness we fight against every day is the world as is. It is the world as it was constructed over the past several centuries. It is the feature, not a bug. No matter how many times we repeat this, it does not seem to always register to those who think that certain modes of repair or revolution are in effect attacking the feature, when in their conceptions they cannot. So, enter Cedric Robinson. His work is really about those alternative conceptions—alternative to Western thought and alternatives within Western thought—that explode the master narratives that gave salience to the category of “ideology.” It is in those alternative conceptions where human consciousness resides. It is in those alternative conceptions where the true imagination of a new world will reside. Any program for true revolutionary change must then reside there. And for Black folk, it must presage what Robinson called “the oneness” which animated every struggle we have participated in; every iteration of the Black Radical tradition has been about becoming one, knowing that without each other we are incomplete. Without each other, the new world we might imagine is incomplete. My book is an attempt to think through some of that imagining with Robinson as guide.

Roberto Sirvent  is editor of the Black Agenda Report  Book Forum.

Cedric Robinson
Black Radical Tradition

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Black August Builds on Our Black Radical Traditions
Charles Brooks
Black August Builds on Our Black Radical Traditions
10 August 2022
Black August is the commemoration of actions carried out by revolutionaries ranging from Nat Turner to George Jackson.
Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race
Minkah Makalani
Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race
10 February 2021
An examination Robinson’s body of work can enrich our understanding of racial capitalism and offer additional tools for overcoming our political im
Births of a Nation, Redux: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson
Robin D.G. Kelley
Births of a Nation, Redux: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson
18 November 2020
What Robinson identified as “the rewhitening of America” a century ago is what we’re seeing play out today.
Marc Lamont Hill and the Legacy of Punishing Black Internationalists
Noura Erakat
Marc Lamont Hill and the Legacy of Punishing Black Internationalists
07 December 2018
Hill’s bold statement to the UN is part of the internationalist Black radical tradition, exemplified by Paul Robeson, the Black Panther Party, and
On the Futures of Black Radicalism in These Times
Gaye Theresa Johnson , Alex Lubin
On the Futures of Black Radicalism in These Times
25 October 2017
“The book calls for a liberation rooted in Black radicalism, but applicable to everyone made unfree by racial capitalism.”
Claudia Jones
Charisse Burden-Stelly, PhD
Why Claudia Jones Will Always Be More Relevant than Ta-Nehisi Coates
20 September 2017
“Coates assumes that all the leftists are white, and all race analysis is liberal.”

More Stories


  • Black Agenda Radio January 27, 2023
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio January 27, 2023
    27 Jan 2023
    Police killings increase, Nicaragua, and Cuba in Africa
  • Record Number of Police Killings in 2022
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Record Number of Police Killings in 2022
    27 Jan 2023
    Samuel Sinyangwe is founder of the Mapping Police Violence Project.
  • Observations of Nicaragua's Revolutionary Process
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Observations of Nicaragua's Revolutionary Process
    27 Jan 2023
    Erica Caines is publisher of the website Hood Communist. She is also co-coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas team.
  • Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return - Part 1
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return - Part 1
    27 Jan 2023
    Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of the recently published book Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s…
  • The State Repression of U.S. Settler Colonialism in The South: BAP ATLANTA STATEMENT
    Black Alliance for Peace Atlanta City-Wide Alliance
    The State Repression of U.S. Settler Colonialism in The South: BAP ATLANTA STATEMENT
    25 Jan 2023
    The plan for an Atlanta police training facility known as "Cop City" is the latest phase of state repression in that region. 
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us