I Am Hippolyta, Discoverer: Genres of Being Human beyond the Prevailing Order of Man

Abstract

Following Sylvia Wynter’s call to historicize the human, we bring the posthumanist deconstruction of humanism in conversation with the Black feminist praxis of sociogeny. By situating modern categories of race, gender, sexuality, and the human itself within their colonial legacies of knowledge production, we trace the colonial archetype of the human as Man, and how we might disrupt this ever-present monolithic paradigm. To that end, we turn to Hippolyta Freeman, a character in the afrofuturist science-fiction horror television show Lovecraft Country, to explore genres of being human beyond the prevailing order of Man.