Sylvia Wynter

Sylvia Wynter has produced a rich body of work synthesizing Black studies, anthropology, cybernetics, literary studies, Caribbean studies, feminist theory, and more. One pivotal concept within her theoretical apparatus is that of the human. Despite its use as a cultural weapon, empty promise, theological gambit, or justification for colonial conquest, Wynter thinks the human has yet to be properly articulated.

For Wynter, the human operates at multiple scales, ranging from individual consciousness, to its embeddedness in a specific ‘genre’ of being human, to the racialized distribution of humanness at the planetary scale. At the same time, in her analysis, the term ‘Man’ has served as an exclusionary substitute for the human. This orthogonal humanism has invited a volley of disparate readings. Wynter has been rallied, among other things, to afropessimism, posthumanism, counter-humanism, and postcolonial and decolonial thought.

This one-day symposium aims to articulate the stakes of Wynter’s work and its reception by way of attending to the different scales of the human, and of how the cosmological, philosophical, theological, economic, scientific, and political narratives in her work map onto one another and generate a rethinking of ‘the human project’.