Ep. 57 – Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”

Always Already Podcast, a critical theory podcast

In this episode, James, Shadee, and John settle into unsettling the ongoing colonial project with Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” The trio work through Wynter’s textured genealogy that traces the transmutations of the European conception of the human from its early days as a Christian subject within the Latin Church to the emergence of Man1 as a political subject during the Renaissance, followed by the Enlightenment’s Man2 — an evolutionary biological-economical creature that still dominates Western ideologies today. The discussion relates Wynter’s project to post-humanism and Afro-pessimism, and questions whether the problem of antiblack racism is a problem of the human category generally, or if Wynter’s move to rehabilitate the human by thinking it through genres is a more generative tack to take. It also takes on the ways Wynter’s anti-Man humanism engages anticolonial movements in the 1960s.

Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment, potentially provide episode transcripts, and more – plus, you may have the chance to jump your request to the top of the request queue. Thanks to listener Jordan F for the Wynter suggestion. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. We are part of the Critical Mediations network. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, and always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/wynter.mp3

Links:

• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis – 2015 anthology of Wynter’s writings edited by Katherine McKittrick;
• Sylvia Wynter’s audio response to her 2012 induction as a fellow by the Institute of Jamaica, summarizing her life oeuvre
• “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter and David Scott” (pdf at link)
• “No Humans Allowed: An Open Letter to my Colleagues”
• Greg Thomas’ interview with Sylvia Wynter at Proud Flesh

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Portrait of Jamaican novelist, dramatist, essayist and academic Sylvia Wynter, circa 1970s.”
Found at: http://kalamu.com/neogriot/2016/12/23/pov-are-you-an-intellectual/