Sylvia Wynter

Agora

Sylvia Wynter

b. 1928

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

The idea of “Man” that the modern West took to be humanity as such is only one version of being human, built on excluding others – and we must invent new ones.

Placement

African & Africana Philosophy · Latin America & Caribbean · Society & History, Metaphysics, Politics & Law

Jamaican writer and theorist, emerita at Stanford: the modern West “overrepresented” its own idea of Man – first the rational political subject, then the biological and economic being – as the human as such; being human is a cultural, “sociogenic” praxis that can be reinvented.

Key ideas

Overrepresentation of Man (Man1, Man2)
Sociogenic principle
Coloniality of being
Genres of the human

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Influence

Influenced by 6

Bartolomé de las Casas

influenced by
In a two-part essay on New Seville, the first Spanish settlement in Jamaica, and the conversion experience of Las Casas (1984), Wynter took his break with the encomienda as a turning point in the debate over who counts as fully human; she returned to his dispute with Sepúlveda in later essays (1995, 2003). S. Wynter, “New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas”, Jamaica Journal 17:2 (1984), 25–32, and 17:3 (1984), 46–55; “1492: A New World View” (1995)
Evidence: AI draft
Bartolomé de las Casas › 1484–1566
W. E. B. Du Bois

influenced by
Wynter took Du Bois’s ‘problem of the color line’ as the central problem of the order of ‘Man’ she seeks to overcome (‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 2003). S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Evidence: AI draft
W. E. B. Du Bois › 1868–1963
Aimé Césaire

influenced by
Wynter took up Césaire’s ‘humanism made to the measure of the world’ for a new science of the human (‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 2003). S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003); A. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (1950)
Evidence: AI draft
Aimé Césaire › 1913–2008
Frantz Fanon

influenced by
Wynter took up Fanon’s claim that besides phylogeny and ontogeny there is sociogeny, holding that human experience is shaped by cultural codes (‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle’, 2001). S. Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black’” (2001); F. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952)
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Michel Foucault

influenced by
Wynter took up Foucault’s view of ‘Man’ as a recent invention of the modern episteme and traced its colonial forms (‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 2003). S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003); M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (1966)
Evidence: AI draft
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Aníbal Quijano

influenced by
Wynter took up Quijano’s ‘coloniality of power’, with its racial classification of world populations, as one axis of the coloniality of being (‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 2003). S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003); A. Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina” (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Aníbal Quijano › 1928–2018

Influenced 1

Walter Mignolo

influenced
In “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” (2015) Mignolo read Wynter’s critique of the overrepresentation of Western “Man” as the human as a central contribution to decolonial thought. W. D. Mignolo, “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?”, in K. McKittrick (ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015)
Evidence: AI draft
Walter Mignolo › b. 1941

Criticism

Criticizes 1

Charles Darwin

criticised
In “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” (2003) Wynter read Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) as the founding text of a second, biocentric conception of Man, in which the colonised and the poor appeared as the “dysselected” – a self-description of the West she set out to unsettle. S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003), 257–337
Evidence: AI draft
Charles Darwin › 1809–1882

Works

2003Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Long essay in CR: The New Centennial Review: the modern West “overrepresented” its own genres of Man – first the rational political subject, then the biological and economic being – as the human as such.

Position

Wynter’s essays, which cross literary criticism, history and philosophy, ask what it means to be human. Since the Renaissance, she argues, the West has produced successive “genres” or descriptions of the human: “Man1”, the rational political subject that replaced the Christian believer, and, since the 19th century, “Man2”, the biological and economic being of Darwin and Malthus, defined by natural selection and scarcity. Each was “overrepresented” as if it were humanity as such, and each was defined against those it excluded – the colonised and enslaved, later the racialised poor – whom it cast as irrational or “dysselected”. Taking up Fanon’s claim that besides phylogeny and ontogeny there is sociogeny, she holds that humans are hybrid beings, at once biological and storytelling, whose experience of themselves is shaped by cultural codes. Drawing on Aimé Césaire and on Aníbal Quijano’s “coloniality of power”, she calls for a conception of the human “after Man” that would no longer need an excluded other.

Life & context

Sylvia Wynter (born 1928 in Holguín, Cuba, to Jamaican parents) grew up in Jamaica and won a scholarship to King’s College London, where she studied Spanish and took a master’s degree in 1953. In the 1950s she wrote for radio and the stage in Britain, partly with the Guyanese writer Jan Carew, and in 1962 published the novel “The Hills of Hebron”. She taught Hispanic literature at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica from 1963, moved to the University of California, San Diego, in 1974 and in 1977 to Stanford University, where she is professor emerita of Spanish and Portuguese and of African and Afro-American Studies. In 2010 she received the Order of Jamaica.