Of Black Study By JoshuaMyers, London: Pluto Press. 2023. 288 pages. $35.60 (paperback). ISBN: 9780745344126

What should we make of Black Study, its purpose, its technologies, its institutions, its multiple meanings? Is it the study of Black peoples, Black place, Black meaning? Or is it the study of racism, Blackness as otherness, Blackness as opposite to the workings of capitalism and white supremacy? Or, as Christina Sharpe (2016) puts it, is it the unceasing hold of the slave ship as formative trauma and its variegated afterlives? For Joshua Myers, Black Study is about all these things. It is also, primarily, about history: the history of ideas and their boundaries, their propagations and form-giving powers to the worlds and institutions made in their aftermath, as well as the work Blackness does in the contemporary academia. At the core of this work are the numerous ways Black Study critiques Western modes of knowledge production and a critique of Black Study as it is currently constituted in academia: as a deflection against alternative forms of knowing and being, as a tool of hegemony, and as dilatory of the more radical aspects of Black intellectual production. Myers brings this critique to the heart of the social sciences and humanities in a forceful, sustained practice of clarification, cutting through the propaganda and mystique that academia builds around itself, to show not only how academia is structured and given meaning by wider political influences, but also how these influences are in turn reified by academic practices and appeals to neutrality. These critiques are not new, but what Myers has given us in this book is the rarest of things: a re-membering of the purpose and history of Blackness as intellectual life, a call to arms, and a beautiful example of what it means to write Black. Theory and history merge, moving from the personal experiences of its intellectual heavyweights to wider critiques on the nature of law, order, and social sciences as the site of reproduction of racial hierarchies and schemas, rendering this a multiplicity of experiences in readily accessible language. Readable and dense with Black intellectual history, this book is destined to become a staple of introductory courses to Black Studies at the graduate level and an essential resource to research in the field. Enough about what the book is, then. What drives this text to such heights, and such depths? Conflict, for one thing. Haunting. Doublespeak. Madness, even. In this book, things are said once but twice heard, through reverberations. This begins at the level of its structure. The book takes the form of six chapters, each tied to a Black intellectual of note (June Jordan, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, Cedric Robinson, Toni Cade Bambara), and purports to give a somewhat chronological account of the origins of the field, its intellectual embeddedness, conflicts with the wider strictures of academic practice, and the development of the radical traditions and breaks with the academy. Each main chapter is also related to a theme (e.g., hesitance, human, speech, order) central to the work of the intellectual studied, but Myers, in the tradition of the Black trickster gods (e.g., Eshu, Anansi), has allowed for hauntings to work through his text in ways that transform this into a truly Black work. Fred Moten's (2003) work on Black rupture haunts here, as does Africa as home, artefact, and Black fetish. Du Bois as the originary force of many fields in the humanities is thoroughly investigated, but Moten's (2003) practice of refusal and breaks stalks him through his conflicts with the academy and institutional Black studies. Audre Lorde's (1982) biomythography is a spectral presence to Myers's work, through her investigation of the roles of intellectual talents over and against daily struggles for existence and meaning in the enterprise of Black life. In Myers's writing, Wynter disturbs the dominance of African American discourse in Black study through feminist praxis, accurately pointing out the ways in which Blackness as an institutionalized discipline loses much of its force and power when centred around a single story. For Myers, Africa walks with Carruthers, as an intense labour of love and fetish, the fountain of knowledge that speaks and yet must be spoken for. Madness as Black opposition to Western forms of order troubles Robinson, driving him to Black radicalism as Myers recounts. Spectral geographies of Black haunting tie the book together as it moves amongst continents and ideas, promiscuous in its embrace of the ghosts and real bodies that make up Blackness. Religions make their case for a piece of the Black body and are rebuffed by Blackness's refusal to be a single being (again, see Moten). White supremacy appears as apex predator, death drive, eternal consumer, but Blackness—to read Myers's construction of it—is a ghostly god, infinitely shapeshifting and siring, conflicted, forever labile. Of Black Study is moving, haunting, changing. It says Blackness will never die. What's a predator to a ghost, after all?

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