Black life, that is, the range of thought and behavior of African/a peoples has been the foundation upon which the modern world was built; it, too, has been the foundation upon which the modern world centers its systems and institutions of distain … often collapsing anything that is seen to be other … into its limited definitions of Blackness. For many of us, Black life can primarily be understood as an articulation of marronage; a resistance to the dialectical processes of existing and not existing in the warped imagination of whiteness. To understand the complexities and simplicities of Black life, to see constant manifestations of the refusal to be dehumanized, we must push on the way we think about Black life … identifying and mapping the improvisational processes that produce polyrhythmic ways of being, which is the primary essence Black life … ways of being that ultimately is a refusal to fit into narrowly constructed categories of racist thought … mostly actualized, not even on purpose. Moten suggest that Black Studies must always maintain its relationship with Black Study, as it is “Black study that refreshes lines of rigorously antidisciplinary invention, effecting intellectual renewal against academic sterility” [The Universal Machine, 2018: 192]. Black Studies is the insurrectionary project of Black life. For Moten, “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present [The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2013: 110]. It is the ‘already present’ that Josh Myers has provided an important meditation on, study outside/inside the university, an exploration of the radical praxis of Black life. Today, we present a recent talk from Josh Myers titled: Cedric Robinson and the Precepts of Black Studies. In addition to being a member of the Africa World Now Project collective, Josh Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, musics, and foodways as well as critical university studies, and disciplinarity. He is the author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019) and, recently released, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021), as well as the editor of A Gathering Together Literary Journal. His current book project, Of Black Study [Pluto Press, 2023] explores how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Of Black Study 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, Josh 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. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!