Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · black people, blackness, body, colonialism, consciousness, creolization, human, human ecology, indigenous peoples, knowledge, land, migration, modernity, philosophy, race, racism, representation, slavery, territory, theory, violence
“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).
Comment (0)Kathryn Yusoff: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropocene, black people, blackness, colonialism, critique, earth, earth system, geology, materiality, politics, race, slavery, theory
“No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between black feminist theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Forerunners series
ISBN 9781517907532, 1517907535
xiv+115 pages
Commentary: McKenzie Wark (Verso Blog, 2019).
Comment (0)Alexander G. Weheliye: Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · assemblage, bare life, biopolitics, black people, feminism, freedom, human, property, race, racialization, racism, slavery, theory
“Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of ‘racializing assemblages,’ taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye’s argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the ‘bare life and biopolitics discourse’ exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2014
ISBN 9780822356912, 0822356910
x+209 pages
Reviews: Ashon Crawley (LARB, 2015), Marianna Szczygielska (Parallax, 2015), Aditi Surie von Czechowski (Comp Stud South Asia, Africa and Middle East, 2015), Marianela Munoz and Charles Holm (Afro-Paradise, 2015), Megan H. Glick (Hypatia Rev, 2015), Shelleen Greene (Somatechnics, 2016), Amber Jamilla Musser (philoSOPHIA, 2016), Gabriela Radulescu (Allegra Lab, 2016), Ander Mendiguren Nebreda (Athenea Digital, 2017, ES).
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