Black Study and Catastrophe
a conversation with Bedour Alagraa and Joshua Myers
Please join us for a conversation with Bedour Alagraa and Joshua Myers that considers the role of study and thought amid the current crisis. Drawing from Myers’s Of Black Study and Alagraa’s forthcoming The Interminable Catastrophe the conversation explores the ways that Blackness can more than respond to antagonism but reshape how we understand the terms.
A self-described ‘wayward political theorist’, Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press.
More broadly, Dr. Alagraa is interested in Black radical genealogies in political theory, history/ies of political concepts, Caribbean thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s) (among other topics). She has also studied and written extensively on the works of Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter and, alongside Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., is editing a volume of Chairman Fred Hampton’s speeches.
The Interminable Catastrophe (forthcoming Duke) charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. The Interminable Catastrophe also considers how we might interrupt the 'Bad Infinity” of the catastrophic, via the work(s) of Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Clyde Woods, Derek Walcott, and others.
A central thread that guides all of Joshua Myers’s work is an approach to knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely interprets what is around us, but can transform and renew these spaces we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.
Joshua M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Holy Ghost Key, the winner of the 2023 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize (Broadside Lotus Press, 2024), Of Black Study (Pluto, 2023), Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021), and We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019), as well as the editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.
His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, musics, and foodways as well as critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Washington History, The Journal of Academic Freedom, The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Downbeat, The New Inquiry , Pambazuka, Obsidian, and Burning House Press, among other literary spaces.
He serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the SNCC Legacy Project and is the senior content producer at the Africa World Now Project. He was the co-coordinator of the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles Oral History Project and organizes with Washington DC’s Positive Black Folks in Action. In addition, he serves on the editorial boards of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, Siyabonana: The Journal of Africana Studies, and The Journal of Black Studies.