Sylvia Wynter

In this paper, I examine the Caribbean reparations movement using an intersectional framework that is located within the Black radical tradition. In order to engage civil society in the discourse of reparations, I argue for the movement to have a strong youth-led component. In addition, I use Frantz Fanon s notion of new humanism, Sylvia Wynter s concept of the Third Event and Walter Rodney s groundings pedagogy as entry points for the Black radical imagination to develop and implement its own ideologies of liberation through a collective struggle towards Caribbean reparations. As such, the paper explores philosophies of Rastafari livity and traces how the social movement influenced the consciousness shift in individuals across working and middle classes in Jamaica in the 196 s to 197 s. The paper argues that Rastafari philosophies embody Fanon and Wynter s notions of the human in thinking through Caribbean reparations.

Humanism and Enlightenment are words associated with the birth of rights-bearing Man. Yet this birth was accompanied by the rise of another Enlightenment concept: race. This chapter theorizes the effects of the twinned, contradictory birth of pseudo-biological human difference and "universal" Man. Starting in the Renaissance and concluding in the "posthuman" present, the chapter shows how conceptions of the human emerged from interactions between Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. From the Enlightenment onward, theories of religion, politics, and culture have centered on contestations over the limits of this human. Rather than telling a linear narrative of Man-human-posthuman, such contests present an unfinished project that continues to this day.

One recurring theme in philosophical work from and on the Americas has to do with the relationship between European Modernity and Colonialism. Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter’s penetrating analysis of this relationship offers a description of what she refers to as “European Man,” in which particular European (patriarchal, bourgeois, and white) accounts of “the human”, and especially of the human as rational, posit themselves as universal. What is significant about her critique of this view, is that she does not simply abandon notions of universality, or even humanism, but rather directs her work toward a call to theoretical action in the form of “the Human project,” in which the failures of the European Enlightenment project are avoided in favor of a more genuinely universal and liberatory account of the human. This chapter stands as an effort to take up the challenge posed by Wynter’s analysis, focusing in particular on the ways in which a particular understanding of reason informed European Man as an ideal, and suggesting what understanding of reason would be most appropriate to Wynter’s liberatory humanism.

This paper explores the foundational role of race in humanitarianism, its historical geographies, genealogy, and contemporary practice. I pay particular attention to the work of Sylvia Wynter on the overrepresentation of (white bourgeois) Man in modernist understandings of the human that form the basis of humanitarianism in the present. Building on Wynter I offer an alter-historical geography of humanitarianism, locating its genus in the voyages of 1441 and 1492 that unsettles other critical work on the colonial origins of humanitarianism as both a normative and instrumental form of governance and their geographies. In following what Wynter terms a “human view”, I explore the racist orderings of Rational Man and his irrational, racialised ‘others’ that work to structure humanitarianism’s subjects. Alongside this I consider the parasitic relations of humanitarianism to the negation of life enacted through the genocide of Black and Indigenous peoples, arguing humanitarianism’s claims to save lives and relieve suffering cannot be divorced from conquistador violence. I argue that grappling with what Wynter calls “category problems” is necessary as humanitarianism — or huManitarianism — faces the contemporary challenges raised by Black Lives Matter that undermine and question its universalist legitimacy.

The dissertation is available here (open access after an embargo period) https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/3423aaa4-b224-4d51-bfe1-20f66fb049ca

What does it mean to be of a particular gender? I answer this question with an account of genders as dynamic categories, exploring the analogy between what genders are (e.g., men or women) and what genres are (e.g., Novels, Ballads, or Hip-Hop). For instance, due to its relation to other and earlier pieces, we recognize, e.g., a particular song as Hip-Hop. However, the piece will also develop that genre further. Likewise, e.g., the category of men emerges, persists and transforms through a specific sort of response of individuals to earlier supposed men, which emerges in social interactions.

Drawing on critical and (trans-)feminist theory, phenomenologist, enactivist, and systems theoretical approaches, I show that gender categories themselves develop in a dynamic between three elements: (1) at any given time, there is an enactment class of individuals ambiguously belonging to the category in question; (2) these individuals are, in an embodied and intersubjective way, enacted as practical reinterpretations of earlier members of that category; (3) this unfolds in a matrix of hermeneutic and material relations, which loop with both the class and the enaction.

Thereby, that an individual is gendered, emerges between two levels of enaction, that of bodily people and that of the dynamic between them. As what an individual is gendered in enaction, however, is constituted by relations within and beyond that situation. This responsive realization gives rise to feedbacking histories of acts, people, relations, and enactment classes, thus explaining how gender can be both solid and open to change.

Attitudes towards women as measures of all deviation from societal norms, beginning with the female body in itself, are often situated into the social conscious that justifies their exclusion from political and economic life. For those whose womanhood intersects with other axes of oppression, such as race or queerness, capitalist society has further embedded traditions of abjection and exclusion for what threatens the purity of whiteness and maleness at the core of universal humanism. In examining these historically anchored conceptions of women’s bodies as monstrous and volatile, analyzing these categorizations in the flesh is much more potent, being forced to confront the traumas of their materiality. This paper investigates how many women in performance art have positioned themselves in such a way to showcase the material conditions of being racially, sexually, and/or ‘naturally’ other.


*This paper is published in a conference anthology and is based on the second chapter of my MA thesis.

In recent years, the vast and expansive oeuvre of cultural critic and theorist Sylvia Wynter has received enthusiastic response from a seemingly ever-increasing group of scholars. Drawing from and contributing to this great interest in Wynter’s writings, this essay further elucidates and build upon one of her often referenced concepts: “demonic ground.” Despite Wynter’s use of the terrestrial term “ground,” I argue that the concept is fundamentally oceanic. I then build on this insight and the work of Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye and others to coin “demonic ocean” as an alternative vantage point of Black study. The article brings together scholarship in religious studies, Black studies, and the blue humanities.

This essay explores, in existential phenomenological terms, some of the elements of Sylvia Wynter's conception of black subjectivity as posed by her provocative essay, ‘Toward the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is
Like to Be Black.’  The underlying challenges of consciousness and intersubjectivity posed by an antiblack world's presupposition of alien blackness presses extraordinary challenges to Thomas Nagel's essay on which the third term in the subtitle is based.  The Fanonian question of experience from a point of view that is not supposed to be a point of view makes these reflections all the more poignant where epistemic norms of dehumanization reign.  The author's theory of teleological suspensions of disciplinary decadence is offered as a positive intervention in this analysis.

This essay reexamines the life of the three enslaved Black "women" Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy at the hands of the acclaimed "Father of Modern Gynecology" J. Marion Sims through the lens of Afropessimism as a means of developing a new analytics of seeing modern scientific development. Through a critical Black studies engagement with the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, the paper sets out to explain and expand the concept of 'primitive accreditation' as it relates to the foundational narratives and performances of violence constitutive of the modern scientific conceptual economy. Through paradigmatic analysis, the essay aims to antagonize the ease in which anti-Blackness coheres bio-centric notions of gender, sexuality, and humanity as well as suggest that science studies as a field has not yet wrestled with the gender/genre question of Blackness as a problem for the axioms of thought and being.

Instead of one black intellectual tradition, there are black intellectual traditions.  After discussing the origins of intellectual work among people designated "black," this article explores various intellectual movements from black nationalisms, liberal, conservative, and radical movements to those organized round Afrocentricity, existentialism, feminism, philosophy, religious thought, and other areas of research and activism.

Nagar kirtans are street assemblies with Sikh spiritual music, political marches, and free food distribution. They are especially large in April during the Punjabi harvest festival of Vaisakhi but also take place in other months. This paper explores the political praxis of nagar kirtans in Canada to contribute to critiques of secularism and theorize the political ontology in the Sikh context. I conceptualize nagar kirtan as a mobile court of both poetic pilgrimage and politics, which engage an embodied and performative world-making process, termed performed worlding, that is at odds with the modern ontology of the secular state. The empirical study analyzes early 20th century nagar kirtans in Vancouver and contemporary ones in urban Canada in the 2010-decade. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out between 2017 and 2018 including analysis of interviews and archival and media content. Early nagar kirtans in Vancouver were aligned with the anti-colonial Ghadar Movement to protest the racial state of Canada. In the contemporary context, the study reveals competing ways of worlding the political ontologies of the mobile court. On the one hand, there is an increased commodification and state presence that refashions the practice at larger Vaisakhi nagar kirtan to be marketable to Canadian multiculturalism. On the other hand, the bottom-up assembling of participants align a spiritual politics of Sikh and Punjabi world-making, one that is grounded in practices of horizontal organizing and mutual care and sustain a form of embodied expression against racial Canada.

Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Mask that, “We believe that the juxtaposition of the black and white races have resulted in a psycho-existential complex.”  We concur with that statement and look to investigate the way that black suicide as an implosive performance of psycho-somatics re-writes the world’s expectations. This is done, not as a means to glorify black suicide, but as means to shine light on the horrifying design of the anti-black paradigm that presents immobility as the only possible form of mobility, and self-destruction as an optimal modality of agency . “The name psychosomatic pathology,” Fanon says, “is given to the general body of organic disorders developed in response to a situation of conflict. Psycho-somatic, because its determinism is psychic in origin. This pathology is considered a way the organism can respond, in other words how it adapts to the conflict, the disorder being both a symptom and a cure.”  We read this Fanonian conflict as an elaboration of paradigmatic relations where a Manichean conflict between “a white folks’ sector” and “a sector of niggers,”  results in Blackness being consistently born into a dehumanization, a structural positioning in-absence. These dynamics lay the foundations for a theory of gratuitous violence. And yet, I argue that Fanon’s work is deeper than a theory of social death, not because of an insistence on social life, but because of an insistence that gratuitous violence becomes gratuitous trauma and that this relationship between metaphysical violence and psychic damage present problems for thought worth thinking through.

This paper will attempt to analyze major themes that are of most interest to me while sadly leaving out others (anti-colonialism) as much as I can of Sylvia Wynter and Paulo Freire.  The first section will introduce Sylvia Wynter which will include a brief genealogy of her massive collection of work. I will argue why will not receive the same recognition as her Western and Anglo counterparts as she leverages her black Jamaica womanness to formulate a critique against the west. Wynter’s work is extremely eclectic and far reaching in depth and breath, is like the eclecticism of Freire which explains my attraction to both thinkers. The second section will understand the importance of praxis of being a human mean. Where do ideas of what it means to be human originate from in their work? Humanization, the “human,” and praxis and the human as a verb will be explored in this section. And how can we combine both understanding of the human as ontological, experiential, existential, historical and epistemic.  The next section will try to unpack what do race, blackness, class and Marxism must do with them as individuals and how does this manifest itself in their work. Moreover I argue that their social location and positionalities in the world is one explanation of why they have two different interpretation of the same text, in particular when it comes to Fanon’s work on colonialism and “the fact of blackness” and Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the role of the political economy in the material development of social organization .  Last I will propose Joyce E. King’s  (2007)“Critical Studyin’” as a method to combine blackness with a critical pedagogy. This I think has the potential as a decolonizing response to present conditions. a decolonizing pedagogy is about challenging the very idea of what it means to be human, and by extension, the logics of inclusion and exclusion that inforce social boundaries that consequently function to maintain the antiblack founding and liminal categories of nigger/native and Man 2 of the current epistemic cultural framework of the West. Being human is impossible within the current order. I believe both Freire and Wynter can together form a decolonizing praxis to usher move us beyond man and towards the human.

Critical accounts of contemporary higher education are often emplotted by a demand that the state make good on its post-War promises of distributed affluence, inclusion, and social mobility. Oriented by the critical interventions of Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in this article I suggest that despite significant differences between the post-War (liberal) model of students as engaged citizens and the current (neoliberal) model of students as customers and entrepreneurs, both are rooted in the same template of humanity. That is, they are different iterations of the same modern subject that requires the violent racial and colonial architectures of the nation-state and global capital to enable their reproduction and legitimate their claims to progress, autonomy, and universal reason. Yet most efforts to address the contemporary problems of higher education fail to identify this constitutive violence, because these efforts are rooted within liberal frames of justice that self-preservingly cannot challenge their own conditions of possibility. I suggest that the orienting framework of transformative justice offers possibilities for dismantling the modern subject and reimagining and remaking higher education in ways that affirm the ethical and political obligations that are rooted in our entanglement with each other and the world. However, these possibilities are not without complication and must be engaged in their full complexity in our efforts to imagine and practice justice otherwise in the context of higher education.

This article traces the centrality of capitalism in the work of three decolonial feminists: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Sayek Valencia. Elaborating on the role of capitalism in each of their work separately, I argue that each of these thinkers conceptualizes capitalism in a novel and urgent way, charting new directions for both theory and social movement practice. I thus argue that the decolonial feminist tradition holds crucial philosophical and historical resources for understanding the emergence of capitalism and its endurance. The feminist strand of the decolonial tradition proposes one of the most compelling historical and theoretical conceptions of capitalism. Rather than take capitalism as a singular and hermetically sealed system, decolonial feminist thinkers of capitalism render how deeply imbricated capitalism as an integrated whole has always been, not only in colonization, but in heteropatriarchy, cissexism, and racism. Moreover, a central contention of this strand in anticapitalist thinking argues for reconceptualizing not only how we conceive of capitalism as a structure of domination, but also how social movements contesting this structure should orient themselves, theoretically and politically. Embarking on a decolonial and feminist trajectory of anticapitalist praxis thus demands not only a renewed analysis of what capitalism is and how it functions, but also its history and the differentiated geographies of its development. Although other traditions of anticapitalist thinking have engaged some of these strands, it is in the decolonial feminist tradition that we find one of the most compelling, multifaceted, and urgent manifestations of this praxis. In order to shed light on this approach, I trace the development of decolonial feminist anticapitalism in the work of three of its most sensitive thinkers: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Sayek Valencia. In doing so, I argue that the decolonial feminist tradition holds crucial philosophical and historical resources for understanding the emergence of capitalism and its endurance in ways that transcend the limitations of much of the contemporary Marxist-feminist tradition. Each of these thinkers' work is different,

This paper will examine these racial formation processes by situating the spaces and places poor blacks congregate US and Brazil within the global racial regime of domination, in which carcerality plays a central role (Alves 2012, 2016). I will draw from the literature of African Diaspora as an analytical framework articulated by Alves (2012, 2016) as he extends the work of Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, Jared Sexton, Paul Gilroy, Henri Lefebvre and others. The literature on black genocide is essential to suggest a “supra-national geography of death” (Vargas, 2010, as cited in Alves, 2012) and geography of resistance forged by people living under a racial regime of terror (Gilroy, 1993, as cited in Alves, 2012). The spatialized nature of antiblackness is what I am primary concerned as is circulates across oceans and large land masses to establish a global white supremacy can be easily located within different territories where black life is in a permanent state of siege, whether in Brazil, the United States or elsewhere. In Brazil and the US, statistics illustrate the deadly consequences of these economies of violence. They have evinced a historical pattern of black vulnerability to death energized by state technologies of confinement such as racial segregation, police violence and mass incarceration (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; James, 1996; Nascimento, 1989; Russell-Brown, 1998; Silva, 1998; Vargas, 2010 as cited in Alves, 2012). Conceiving the African Diaspora as mutually constituted through death, space and resistance is to account for its ghastly, yet, promising outcome: the anti-black project that constitute the nation state also provide the context in which a transnational black politics may emerge (Alves, 2016). It is both theoretically and politically relevant to reclaim black urban life and to account for a transnational black subjectivity produced in such deathly spatialities, since if blacks are always and already marked as socially dead (Sexton, 2011; Wilderson, 2003). Drawing on these insights, let me offer then a conceptualization of the African Diaspora we can speak of “black spatialities”, I am also referring to the geographies of death generated by the state—such as the prison, the favela, the cemetery, the (necro)polis—which have profoundly shaped black urban lives (Alves, 2012; Mbembe, 2003; McKittrick, 2006).  In discussing black bodies and blackness, I want to continuously articulate that nothing can relate to blackness and if therefore outside of relation to humanity and possibility, at least in this current historical epoch.  Nothing protects blacks at the end of the day against anti-blackness, as the social and economic indicators objectively prove that life changes are related to once racial positionalities and that the closer you are to blackness the greater level of disadvantages (Paixao, 2010; Telles, 2006; Winant, 2001, as cited in Vargas, 2012). Therefore, we should view the deteriorating boundaries between geo-political borders as one planetary system as they are woven together not by different racial formations separated by space and place but as bounded by ontologies and material structures that shape and over-determine the experience of black bodies on the planet.

According to Sylvia Wynter, Western Europeans, invented Man (the white, masculinist, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, imperialist version of the Human) and projected him onto the past as natural and timeless, rather than historical and cultural (Wynter, 1994 2000, 2006, 2006b). In other words, the West does not perceive themselves as representing/practicing one of many specific historical, cultural, and local “genres” of human, but THE HUMAN created by/with their own scientific and now economic systems of knowledge (Wynter, 1994, 2006, 2006b). This explanation, Wynter (2006) calls “Man” as the “descriptive statement of the human,” hereby setting up ontological notions of human that are fixed which functions to dislocate the Global South and the East (niggers, natives, and the global poor) as found outside of the desires/ideal goals of material redemption and the ideal self as white nation-state imperial leaders, to occupy the position of “not-not-quiet, not-humans” (Wynter, 1994, 2000, 2006, 2006b). Consequently, blacks (niggers), natives (savages), and the global poor live and experience a symbolic death through their ejection from economic, civil, social, and cultural life from the global-white-middle-class-economic elites- intellectual class of the metropole and the global North west. 
This explains why education curriculum proposed by global finance, banking and educational organizations/institutions disrupt, disavow, exterminate, or murder indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, languages, ways of knowing, ways of being by positioning it as inferior knowledge production and  primitive strategies for capital accumulation when compared to the West scientific and economic methods (Fals-Borda and Mora-Osejo, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Shizha, 2011; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2001; Wynter, 1994, 2006, 2006b). This epistemic genocide or “murder” in the words of Skutnabb-Kangas is how late-modernity/late capitalism/neo-colonialism/advance capitalism operates under the languages and economic policies of “neoliberal-globalization (Rizvi and Lingard) that seeks to promote and English only education that values the Western methods to address and solve issues resources scarcity, economic development and process, cultural deficiencies, and technological modernization (Barua, 2011). Therefore, this education curriculum, is anti-black, anti-native, anti- Indigenous anti-global poor, and thereby anti human. The curriculum promoted by the IMF and World Bank produces discourses and policies that always give evidence supporting the proposition that the West is the basis for the universal economic human subject and the East and Global South lack these essential characteristics.
In this paper, I will read the class text from weeks seven through thirteenth as examples of “southern theory” (Connell, 2007). The text will be used as evidence to argue that the present description of what it is to be human is being contested and struggled over by the global poor and Indigenous communities. Through their resistance, members of the global south now challenge our notion that Man is the only proper way of understanding the world.  Their struggles over curricula, knowledges, and ways of being offers empirical evidence “the human” is always plural and always an emerging process. Through Sylvia Wynter’s writing, I will be able to offer an alternative conception of the human (Freire, and Fanon too!!) that builds on current critiques of man (the class text) therefore opening radical possibilities to bring a closure to the West and experiment with re-imaging alternatives to hegemonic descriptive statement of the human!

Judith Butler argues for collective liberatory action grounded in ontological vulnerability. Yet descriptive social ontology alone provides neither normative ethical prescriptions nor direction for political action. I believe Butler tries to overcome this gap by appealing to equality as an ethical ideal. In this article, I reconstruct how equality operates in her transition from ontological vulnerability to prescriptive commitments. Then, turning to Sylvia Wynter, I argue Butler's uncritical use of equality constrains the radical direction of her liberatory goals—firstly because it cannot mitigate the coloniality of Being, and secondly because she figures the locus of critique as an anonymous and equally vulnerable body at the limits of the recognizably human. I conclude with Wynter's demand for liberatory critique to arise out of specific decolonial locations of rupture from our historically situated, oppressive, and overrepresented genre of being human.

Artigo presente na coletânea "Pensamento afrodiaspórico em perspectiva: abordagens no campo da História e Literatura" - Volume 1: História.  Fernanda Rodrigues de Miranda; Marcello Felisberto Morais de Assunção (Orgs.) -- Porto Alegre, RS: Editora
Fi, 2021.

This essay explores the increasing salience of blackness in Anglo-American mainstream culture alongside persistent and increasingly mass-spectacularized violence against black people. Engaging Sylvia's Wynter's "deciphering practice" in place of aesthetic criticism, the essay argues that anti-blackness is instantiated as a "structure of feeling," and challenges the metrics of love and hate that frame contemporary anti-racist discourse. Rather, an analytic of taste and consumption guides the analysis of Jordan Peele's 2017 film Get Out, cannibalism in the Middle Passage, and blackface minstrelsy arguing that the politics of aesthetics requires an ethics beside(s) love and hate.

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s (2004) work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s (1994) epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this forgetting, given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing Brennan with Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan (posthumously) comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon (2008). Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such.

How are ‘Man’ and its matters cultivated in urban life? And how are
resistant claims by the Other to be already-human materialised in the city? Through a reading of the human/material of Rangoon, this chapter calls for posthuman engagement with the figure of the human as it is outlined in the work of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and cognate scholarship in the sociogenic mode. With reference to urban life in Rangoon, the chapter considers how matter is already formed in a sedimentary way along the Man/Other-than-Man historical split in the human.The basic claim made here is that unless we understand how the human has been overrepresented in the figure of Man and marginalised as Other-than-Man, then we are far from an understanding of how matter acts in the world’s becoming.

Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics
David Lloyd

“If there is any hope for the human, and if the idea of the human is of any use to the enactment of that hope, then the aesthetic claims and categories through which the human and its subjects are exalted and degraded must be placed under the most violent and most loving scrutiny. Under Representation exemplifies such scrutiny. The rigorous care with which David Lloyd examines and challenges the entanglement of race, representation and the aesthetic is irresistible and indispensable. Under Representation is a major, and singular, achievement.”—Fred Moten, New York University

Under Representation shows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. In taking on the relation of aesthetics to race, Lloyd challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies, as well as the lack of sustained attention to aesthetics in critical race theory.

Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social.

Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: The racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes.  To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present.  Across five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the stereotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura and representation.

Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.

A paper given as part of "consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean" at the Tate—hosted in partnership with Worlding Public Cultures and the University of the Arts London Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN)—to compliment the Tate Britain’s exhibition "Life Between Islands: British - Caribbean Art 1950s – now."

According to poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, the inaugural Carifesta—a 1972 gathering in Georgetown, Guyana, of hundreds of artists celebrating their multiple cultural heritages without precedent and without “foreign magistrates of taste or art”—was one of the most crucial events to have occurred in the region since Emancipation. A council of artists and writers envisioned the shape of the event and aimed to promote art standards based in myriad aesthetic traditions from, their report reads, the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture.” This paper argues that Carifesta was envisaged as a process to redraw—for a mass, regional and diasporic audience—racialized cultural and architectural canons transplanted to and informed by the region during the reign of the colonial plantation. Through engaging contemporaneous theories by Sylvia Wynter and Brathwaite regarding the cultural lives of the enslaved and those of the New World Group and Tapia Group, the paper reads the council’s report as a call to “resurrect” unrecorded images and cultural production systemically omitted from stories of (Euro-)Caribbean aesthetics by those upholding what Wynter terms “plantation ideology.” By attending to the intertwined power of art and architecture, it makes a case that, at its start, Carifesta was a key technology to unmake a colonized Caribbean and build the region, together, anew.

In this brief presentation, which can perhaps be more accurately called a "sketch,"  prepared for a black feminism course in March of 2021 I provide a few points of divergence and convergence between Zakiyyah Jackson in Becoming Human and Sylvia Wynter in "No Humans Involved." Best read aloud.

Taking note of the relatively limited accounts of race in contemporary international legal doctrine, this Article posits a thought experiment: What would international legal theorizing look like not from the place of the metropole or the colony, but rather from the journey of the enslaved, from the barracoon to the hold of the slave ship to the plantation? For one possible answer, this Article turns to the work of the Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter to consider race in relation to international law in order to argue for the utility of replacing a formalist and state-based notion of universalism with a more open-ended and contestation oriented approach. Such a move would reframe international law’s “origin myth” about 1492 from a dyadic account of Western colonizers versus the colonized to a triangular encounter between Europeans, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved Africans. It would also pivot away from understandings of race as a generic form of invidious social differentiation to be managed solely by states as an internal matter to instead theorize legal regimes of racialization in connection with political economy as both distinct and conjoined.

This article interrogates how Sylvia Wynter and Jean-Paul Sartre phenomenologically describe the relationship between freedom and invention. It is argued that from both thinkers a poetic phenomenology of invention can be derived. But the difference between Wynter and Sartre is that Sartre presupposes that literature can only be addressed to already “free” subjects who must take responsibility for their freedom in order to combat alienation. Thus, Sartre claims, “One does not write for slaves.” What is left undertheorized is the epistemic content of freedom.” In contrast, Wynter reads the Black Aesthetics movement as providing an example of how literature must be addressed to those who are not free. In doing so they can invent new understandings of what it means to be free. The question of whether freedom precedes invention, à la Sartre, or invention must precede freedom, as Wynter claims, will affect how one conceptualizes subjectivity and liberation.

This essay proposes that the work of Sylvia Wynter, a canonical figure in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, demonstrates other ways of doing philosophy, a comparative philosophy carried out as a cross-cultural exercise. Sylvia Wynter has argued for a “New Science of the Word” by drawing from the contributions of Frantz Fanon (sociogeny), Aimé Césaire (poetic knowledge), and the field of cybernetics, among other sources. This essay aims to explain the framework and methodology of the New Science and the original transdisciplinary engagement that such a framework facilitates. It argues that, by appropriating the concept of “autopoiesis” beyond the natural sciences, Wynter refashions autopoiesis as autopoetics to answer the age-old question of what it means to be human. Comparative philosophy, the essay concludes, can be fertile ground for Wynter’s project and epistemic decolonization.

This intervention moves beyond Eurocentric critiques to consider the white supremacy of humanitarianism. It argues that whiteness works as a structuring agent and subject of humanitarian norms and practice in the past and present. Drawing on the work of WEB Du Bois on whiteness, Wynterian Black feminist work on the meaning of the human and recent critical work on race and racism in critical security studies I offer an account of how humanitarian sentiments developed with the aim of securing whiteness and continue into the present. Following this, I probe the possibilities for decolonising humanitarianism. Overall, the intervention is intended as a provocation engendering further engagement and discussion.