Neocolonial mind snatching: Sylvia wynter and the curriculum of Man

Abstract

In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in Caribbean, European, African, and American societies. In addition, her work demonstrates how education globally structures a particular cultural, historical, and onto-epistemic anti-Black/anti-Indigenous worldview. In Wynter’s most neglected piece of work ‘Do Not Call Us Negros’ How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism she weaponizes the second and third wave of her work1 to unpack and provide a fresh critique to the Black English debates that occurred in California in the 1990s. In this, she reframes debates about history curriculum and culture from a white conservative nativist one of Man (the status quo) to the alternative Black Studies Alterity Perspective rooted in the liminal Black socio-historical-cultural experiences. Continuing Wynter’s layered excavation of education as the site of EuroAmerican cultural reproduction, I sketch out a different philosophical discourse to those grounded in capital and/or race debates of the social sciences; I present a philosophical European coming of age story of humanism as a distant stage in how the West became self-aware and created a consciousness of itself. In doing so, this Western European humanism, or what Wynter coins Man for short, embarked on a 500-year journey of colonialism/coloniality to plunder the gifts and talents of the minds and bodies of non-middle-class, non-European populations through a process/technique of what I coin Neocolonial Mind Snatching.