Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015)

14 July 2020, dusan

“The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is a critical genealogy of Wynter’s work, highlighting her insights on how race, location, and time together inform what it means to be human. The contributors explore Wynter’s stunning reconceptualization of the human in relation to concepts of blackness, modernity, urban space, the Caribbean, science studies, migratory politics, and the interconnectedness of creative and theoretical resistances. The collection includes an extensive conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick that delineates Wynter’s engagement with writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire, among others; the interview also reveals the ever-extending range and power of Wynter’s intellectual project, and elucidates her attempts to rehistoricize humanness as praxis.”

Essays by Katherine McKittrick, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Walter D. Mignolo, Bench Ansfield, Nandita Sharma, Rinaldo Walcott, Carole Boyce Davies, Demetrius L. Eudell, and a conservation with Sylvia Wynter.

Edited by Katherine McKittrick
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2015
ISBN 9780822358343, 0822358344
xiii+290 pages

Reviews: Anthony Bayani Rodriguez (Antipode, 2015), Lea Hülsen (Kult, 2016), Kaiama L. Glover (Contemporary Women’s Writing, 2016), Inge Mathijssen (philoSOPHIA, 2018), Lauren Nelson (E3W Review of Books, 2019).

Publisher
WorldCat

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R. Bruce Elder: Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (2013)

15 October 2016, dusan

“This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.

This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.”

Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2013
Film and Media Studies series
ISBN 9781554586257, 1554586259
x+765 pages

Reviews: John W. Locke (Canadian J of Film Studies 2014), Robin Walz (Canadian J of History 2014), Bart Testa (U Toronto Quarterly 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (8 MB, updated on 2019-12-14)
EPUB (added on 2019-12-14)

Paget Henry: Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (2000)

21 February 2016, dusan

Caliban’s Reason introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy.

In this ground-breaking work, Paget Henry traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature and marked by strong competition between its European and African orientations, Henry highlights its four main influences–traditional African philosophy, the Afro-Christian school, Poeticism and Historicism–as his organizing principle for discussion.

Offering a critical assessment of such writers as Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Edward Blyden, C.L.R. James and George Padmore, Caliban’s Reason renders a much-needed portrait of Afro-Caribbean philosophy and fills a significant gap in the field.”

Publisher Routledge, 2000
Africana Thought series
ISBN 0415926459, 9780415926454
xiii+304 pages

Reviews: H. Adlai Murdoch (SubStance, 2002), Claudette Anderson (Small Axe, 2002), Charles Mills (Phil Review, 2003), Clevis Headley (Int’l J of African Hist Studies, 2003), Leslie R. James (North Star, 2004).

Interview with author (Linda Martín Alcoff, 2003)

Publisher
WorldCat

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