Sylvia Wynter

Sylvia Wynter, 1970s.

Sylvia Wynter (Holguín, Cuba, 11 May 1928) is a Jamaican dramatist, novelist, critic, philosopher and essayist. Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man." Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.

Sylvia Wynter is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of African and Afro-American Studies, Emerita at Stanford University. Wynter was born in Cuba in 1928, but grew up in her parents’ native Jamaica under British colonial rule. She attended King’s College London in the years following World War II, where she earned both her BA and MA, studying modern languages, specifically Spanish. Between 1954 and 1962, Wynter was one of a group of London-based Caribbean writers working “to give imaginative reality to a Caribbean landscape as yet ‘unstoried, unenhanced;’ and to reconfigure the projected negative stereotype of ourselves as ‘backward natives,’ that had been projected from the logic of colonial discourse.” Her writing included work for BBC-TV and Radio. She travelled extensively, living for a time in Norway and Sweden. In 1963, Wynter was appointed to a tenure track position in Hispanic literature at the University of the West Indies; in 1970, she was promoted to tenure. In 1974, she moved to the University of California at San Diego as Professor of Comparative & Spanish Literature. She was specially appointed to help to create the new interdisciplinary program, Literature and Society in the Third World. In 1977, Wynter moved to Stanford as a professor in both the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of African and Afro- American Studies. She chaired the latter department from 1977 to 1980 and 1989 to 1990 and was acting chair in 1986. Wynter was awarded the Order of Jamaica in 2010. (2017)

Works

Fiction

Drama

• with Jan Carew, Under the Sun, radio play, 1958. Produced for “Caribbean Voices”. Inspired Wynter 1962.
  • En bro til himlen: Radiohørespil, trans. Kurt Kreutzfeld, Copenhagen: Danmarks Radio. Hørespilarkivet, [1962], 92 pp. (Danish)
• Shh, It's a Wedding, musical, 1961.
• with Jan Carew, The Big Pride, tv film script, 1961. Written for Drama '61, ITV. [1]
• Miracle in Lime Lane, play, 1962.
• 1865: Ballad for a Rebellion, play, 1965.
• with Alex Gradussov, Rockstone Anancy, pantomime, 1970.
• Maskarade, play, 1973. Printed in West Indian Plays for Schools, ed. Jeanne Wilson, Jamaica Information Service, 1979; repr. as "Maskarade: A 'Jonkunnu' Musical Play", intro. Sylvia Wynter and Yvonne Brewster, in Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays, ed. Yvonne Brewster, London: Oberon, 2012, 9-132, EPUB. See Davies in McKittrick 2015. [2]

Novel

• The Hills of Hebron, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962, 283 pp; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962, 315 pp; repr., intro. Anthony Bogues, afterw. Demetrius L. Eudell, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2010, xxviii+340 pp. Novel; inspired by the play Under the Sun (1958). See Toland-Dix 2008 and Davies in McKittrick 2015.

Poetry

• "Malcolm X", New World Quarterly 2:1, Dead Season 1965, p 12. Written Feb 1965.

Translated plays

• Federico García Lorca, The Barren One, 1959. Trans. of the play Yerma for BBC Radio’s Third Programme. (Creoles and pidgins, English-based)
• Federico García Lorca, The House and Land of Mrs. Alba, 1968. Trans. of the play La Casa de Bernarda Alba. An extract publ. as "Essay and Play Extract: The House and Land of Mrs. Alba", Jamaica Journal 2:3, Sep 1968, pp 48-56. See Owens 2017.
• Francisco Cuevas, Jamaica Is the Eye of Bolívar, 1979.

Nonfiction

Books

• Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, [1970s], [935] pp. Unpublished manuscript; housed in The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. See White 2010 and a discussion in Small Axe 2016.

• Do Not Call Us Negros: How 'Multicultural' Textbooks Perpetuate Racism, intro. & comm. Joyce King, San Francisco: Aspire, 1992, 126 pp.

• We Must Learn to Sit down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays, 1967-1984, Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2021, 500 pp. [3]

Essays, criticism

Many of these scans have been sourced from an online collection by True Leap Press, a radical publishing collective with members in Illinois and New York. Thank you!

• "The Instant-Novel Now", New World Quarterly 3:3, 1967, pp 78-81. Book review of Peter Abrahams, This Island Now, London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
• "Lady Nugent’s Journal", Jamaica Journal 1:1, Dec 1967, pp 23-34.
• "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism: Part One", Jamaica Journal 2:4, Dec 1968, pp 23-32. Book review essay.
• "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism: Part Two", Jamaica Journal 3:1, Mar 1969, pp 27-42. Book review essay.
• "Book Reviews: Michael Anthony Green Days by the River and The Games Were Coming", Caribbean Studies 9:4, Jan 1970, pp 111-118. [4]
• "Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of the Folk Dance as a Cultural Process", Jamaica Journal 4:2, Jun 1970, pp 34-48.
• Jamaica's National Heroes, forew. Hugh Shearer, Kingston: Jamaica National Trust Commission, 1971, 55 pp.
• "Novel and History, Plot and Plantation", Savacou 5, Jun 1971, pp 95-102.
• "Creole Criticism: A Critique", New World Quarterly 5:4, 1972, pp 12-36.
• "One Love—Rhetoric or Reality? Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism", Caribbean Studies 12:3, Oct 1972, pp 64-97. Book review of One Love by Audvil King, Althea Helps, Pam Wint and Frank Hasfal, 1971. [5]
• "After Word", in Lemuel Johnson, Highlife for Caliban, Ardis, 1973.
• "Ethno or Socio Poetics", Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics 2:2, New York, 1976, pp 78-94, PDF.
• "“We Know Where We Are From”. The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley", 1977. Paper presented at the joint meeting of the African Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association, Houston, TX, November 1977.
• "The Eye of the Other", in Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Kennikat Press, 1977. 8-19.
• "A Utopia from the Semi-Periphery: Spain, Modernization, and the Enlightenment", Science Fiction Studies 6:1, 1979, pp 100-107. Book review of Stelio Cro, ed. Description de la Sinapia, Peninsula en la Tierra Austral: A Classical Utopia of Spain, Hamilton, Ont.: McMaster University, 1975.
• "History, Ideology, and the Reinvention of the Past in Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Laye's The Dark Child", Minority Voices 2:1, 1978, pp 43-61.
• "Sambos and Minstrels", Social Text 1, Winter 1979, pp 149-156. [6]
• "In Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey", Urgent Tasks 12, Summer 1981.
• Beyond Liberal and Marxist Leninist Feminisms: Towards an Autonomous Frame of Reference, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Sep 1982, 43 pp. Working paper.
• "New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Part One", Jamaica Journal 17:2, May 1984, pp 25-32.
• "New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Part Two", Jamaica Journal 17:3, Aug 1984, pp 46-55.
• New Seville: Major Facts, Major Questions, Jamaica: JIS Press, 1984, 20 pp; repr., Kingston: Jamaica National Heritage Trust, 1988, 26 pp.
• "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism", Boundary II 12:3 & 13:1, 1984, pp 19-70.
• "On Disenchanting Discourse: 'Minority' Literary Criticism and Beyond", Cultural Critique 7, Fall 1987, pp 207-244.
• "Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles", World Literature Today 63(4): "Edouard Glissant", Autumn 1989, pp 637-648.
• "Afterword: Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the 'Demonic Ground' of Caliban's 'Woman'", in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, eds. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990, pp 355-372.
• "Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos", Annals of Scholarship 8:2, 1991, pp 251-286.
• "Tras el 'Hombre', su última palabra: Sobre el posmodernismo, les damnes y el principio sociogénico", trans. Ignacio Corona-Gutiérrez, Nuevo Texto Crítico 4:7, 1991, pp 43-83. [7] (Spanish)
• "Rethinking 'Aesthetics': Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice", in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992, pp 237-279.
• "A Black Studies Manifesto", Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1(1): "Knowledge on Trial", Stanford, CA: Institute F.H.I., Fall 1994, pp 3-11. Presented for the Critical Perspectives Forum on the Culture Wars at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, NY, on 20 October 1994.
• "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues", Voices of the African Diaspora 8:2, Fall 1992, pp 13-16; repr., Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1(1): "Knowledge on Trial", Stanford, CA: Institute F.H.I., Fall 1994, pp 42-73; repr. as No Humans Involved, Hudson: Publication Studio, and Moor's Head Press, 2016, 34 pp. Written May 1992. [8]
• "Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis", in C.L.R. James's Caribbean, eds. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, Duke University Press, 1992, pp 63-91.
• "But What Does Wonder Do? Meanings, Canons, Too? On Literary Texts, Cultural Contexts, and What It's Like to Be One/Not One of Us", Stanford Humanities Review 4(1): "Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism", 1994, PDF.
• "The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, the King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, and the Caribbean Rethinking of Modernity", in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, ed. Alvina Ruprecht, Carleton University Press, 1995, pp 17-42.
• "1492: A New World View", in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, eds. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp 5-57.
• "Is 'Development' a Purely Empirical Concept or also Teleological? A Perspective from 'We the Underdeveloped'", in Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa, ed. Aguibou Y. Yansané, Greenwood, 1996, pp 299-316.
• "Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters", in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, eds. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997, pp 141-163.
• "'Genital Mutilation' or 'Symbolic Birth?' Female Circumcision, Lost Origins, and the Aculturalism of Feminist/Western Thought", Case Western Reserve Law Review 47:2, 1997, pp 501-552.
• "Black Aesthetic", in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 1, ed. Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp 273-281; 2nd ed., 2014. [9]
• "Africa, The West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text After Man", in Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni, London: British Film Institute, 2000, pp 25-76.
• "'A Different Kind of Creature': Caribbean Literature, the Cyclops Factor and the Second Poetics of the Propter Nos", Annals of Scholarship 12:1/2, 2001, pp 153-172.
• "Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be 'Black'", in National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America, eds. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp 30-66; repr., 2013.
• "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - An Argument", CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3, Fall 2003, pp 257-337. [10]
• "Black Education, Toward the Human, After "Man": In the Manner of a Manifesto: Framing a Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Millennium", in Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century, ed. Joyce E. King, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005, 357-359. Written Jun 2002.
• "On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project", in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, Paradigm, 2006, pp 107-169.
• "The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and the Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition", in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, eds. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, pp 184-252.
• "Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn / Overturn: A Manifesto". Unpublished essay.

Interviews

• Daryl Cumber Dance, "Conversation with Sylvia Wynter", in New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers, Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1992. [11]

• David Scott, "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter", Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 8, Sep 2000, pp 118-207.

• Joyce E. King, "Race and Our Biocentric Belief System: An Interview With Sylvia Wynter", in Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century, ed. Joyce E. King, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005, 361-366. Conducted in Palo Alto, CA, Jun 2002.

• Greg Thomas, "Proud Flesh Inter/Views Sylvia Wynter", Proud Flesh: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness 4, 2006, PDF.

• with Katherine McKittrick, "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations", in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2014, pp 9-89.

• Natalie Marine-Street, "Sylvia Wynter: An Oral History", Stanford, CA: Stanford Historical Society, Nov 2017, 103 min. Audio.

• Joshua Bennett, Jarvis R Givens, "'A Greater Truth than Any Other Truth You Know': A Conversation with Professor Sylvia Wynter on Origin Stories", Souls 22:1, Jan-Mar 2020, pp 123-137. [12]

• Bedour Alagraa, "What Will Be The Cure?: A Conversation With Sylvia Wynter", Offshoot, Jan 2021. Conducted Dec 2020.

Literature

Books, journal issues

• Journal of West Indian Literature 10(1/2): "Sylvia Wynter: A Transculturalist Rethinking Modernity", eds. Demetrius Eudell and Carolyn Allen, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, Nov 2001. [13]

• Anthony Bogues (ed.), After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2006, xvi+344 pp.

• Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, x+209 pp.

• Katherine McKittrick (ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, xiii+290 pp.

• Small Axe 49: "Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis”: A Discussion", ed. Aaron Kamugisha, intro. David Scott and Aaron Kamugisha, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, pp vii-x & 37-145. [14]

• Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, xiv+115 pp, HTML.

• American Quarterly 70(4): "Sylvia Wynter", ed. Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Dec 2018, pp 831-874. Forum. [15]

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 296 pp. [16]

Essays

• "Sylvia Wynter", in Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Daryl Cumber Dance, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. [17] [18]

• Katherine McKittrick, "Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter", ch 5 in McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 121-141.

• Karen M. Gagne, "On the Obsolescence of the Disciplines: Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter Propose a New Mode of Being Human", Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5:3, 2007, pp 251-264.

• Shirley Toland-Dix, "The Hills of Hebron: Sylvia Wynter’s Disruption of the Narrative of the Nation", Small Axe 25, Feb 2008, pp 57-76.

• Derrick White, "Black Metamorphosis: A Prelude to Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human", The C.L.R. James Journal 16:1, Spring 2010, pp 127-148. [19] [20]

• David Marriott, "Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and 'the Damned'", CR: The New Centennial Review 11(3): "Rodolphe Gasché's Discipline", Winter 2011, pp 45-89.

• Tonya Haynes, "The Divine and The Demonic: Sylvia Wynter and Caribbean Feminist Thought Revisited", in Lowe and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender, ed. V. Eudine Barriteau, Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2012, pp 54-71.

• Kelly Baker Josephs, "The Necessity for Madness: Negotiating Nation in Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron", in Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. Kelly Baker Josephs, University of Virginia Press, 2013, pp 45-68. [21] [22]

• Anthony Rodriguez, Heretical Scripts: Sylvia Wynter & the Decolonial Atlantic, University of Southern California, 2015, 173 pp. PhD dissertation.

• Greg Thomas, "The Body Politics of 'Man' and 'Woman' in an 'Anti-Black' World: Sylvia Wynter on Humanism's Empire (A Critical Resource Guide)", in On Maroonage: Ethical Confrontations with Anti-Blackness, eds. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, Africa World, 2015, pp 67-107.

• Karishma Desai, Brenda Nyandiko Sanya, "Towards Decolonial Praxis: Reconfiguring the Human and the Curriculum", Gender and Education 28:6, 2016, pp 710-724.

• Elisabeth Paquette, "Wynter and Decolonization", in Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ed. M. Peters, Springer, 2016.

• Imani D. Owens, "Toward a ‘Truly Indigenous Theatre’: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca", Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4:1, 2017, pp 49-67.

• Kathryn Yusoff, "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike", e-flux 97, Feb 2019. Excerpt from Yusoff 2018.

• Patricia Reed, "Freedom and Fiction", Glass Bead 3: "Site 2. Dark Room: Somatic Reason and Synthetic Eros", Sep-Nov 2019.
  • "Liberté et fiction", Glass Bead 3: "Site 2. Dark Room: Éros synthétique et raison somatique", 2019. (French)
  • "自由とフィクション", Glass Bead 3, 2019. (Japanese)

• Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, "Open Letter to Sylvia Wynter", The Funambulist 30: "Reparations", Jul-Aug 2020, pp 22-29.

• Zimitri Erasmus, "Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human: Counter-, not Post-humanist", Theory, Culture & Society, Aug 2020.

• Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "Latin American and Caribbean Colonial Studies and/in the Decolonial Turn", in The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898), eds. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias, Routledge, 2020. Focuses on Anibal Quijano and Sylvia Wynter. [23]

See also

• Frantz Fanon

Links

• Profile on King's College London
• ARG
• Wikipedia