Blues for Black Studies with Joshua M. Myers, PhD, Howard University

In my forthcoming work, Of Black Study, is ask:

“What might the Black writer bring to the university? To a different kind of university? One that was imagined as a

site for Blues knowledge, as a site unimpressed and unimpeded by the acquiescence of literary criticism? This remains an open question. But as Sylvia Wynter asks, “If we don’t sing the blues for our own pain, who will sing the blues for them?”

I riff on my earlier blue note for Sterling Brown. For now, I am after a meditation, a Blues for Black Studies, that offers sound and speech as ways out of the racial capitalism that structures university knowledge, the disciplinary restriction which imprisons it, which misnames its meaning. I am after a Black Study that is after W.E.B. Du Bois and June Jordan and Cedric Robinson and Sylvia Wynter and Toni Cade Bambara and Jacob Carruthers, and others. I am after difference.