Trust Sylvia Wynter

Abstract

Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2015, 290pp.; $25.95 paperbackIn the acknowledgements to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, editor Katherine McKittrick writes that '[a]ny engagement with Sylvia Wynter demands openness' (px). Thinking with Wynter demands openness because her insights, if we take them to heart, undo the disciplines that condition what we can know and say about the world. What Wynter wants is nothing less than a collective 'rewriting of knowledge as we know it' (p18), a challenge that asks us - thinkers, creators, knowledge-makers, storytellers - to accept disorientation in exchange for the possibility of exercising 'dazzling creativity' (pl7) as we recalibrate our sense ofwho 'we' are. Wynter's project of completely transforming Western ways of knowing derives from her argument, following Frantz Fanon, that humanness is hybrid. We are, in Wynter's terms, both bios and mythoi; flesh-and-blood organisms that also (re)invent ourselves by telling stories of where we came from and what we are. What we need, then, are forms of knowledge that are adequate to the fact that 'humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis' (p23, emphases in original).So thinking with Wynter demands openness. And it takes time. In a brief introduction to the collection, McKittrick describes Wynter's anticolonial insights as 'knots of histories and ideas and relational narratives', the entangled results of Wynter's working across the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the arts (p3). This knottiness makes itself felt even at the level of the sentence. The sixty-page call-and-response that anchors the book - an archive of interviews, discussions, and written exchanges between McKittrick and Wynter that began in 2007 - showcases the denseness of Wynter's mode of expression. Her sentences are thick with asides; long dashes that facilitate transdisciplinary leaps - from critical race theory to neuroscience and back again - allow her to loop more connections, more implications, into her claims. Sylvia Wynter thus invites the kind of slow, patient engagement that Sylvia Wynter's thinking demands. The collection begins with conversations and then unfolds into more conversations, each contributor thinking with a particular set of Wynter's knots. The result is that rather than offering a stabilizing 'overview' of Wynter's main ideas - a project that would run counter to the ethos of her work, which emphasizes intellectual creativity and epistemological mutation - McKittrick's collection puts them into play: unraveling, retying, riffing on Wynter. It's a project inspired by the closing line of Wynter's correspondence. Yours in the intellectual struggle, McKittrick explains, 'bears witness to the practice of sharing words and letters while also drawing attention to the possibilities that storytelling and wording bring' (p7).As a collaborative project, Sylvia Wynter opens up, again and again, the question of what ethical, epistemological, political, and imaginative possibilities emerge from thinking-feeling-living, as Rinaldo Walcott puts it, 'the human as an alterable species-subject' (p186). The alterability of the human derives from what Wynter describes as a biomutational 'Third Event', the origins of which she traces to the archaeological findings in Blombos Cave, South Africa. As she elaborates in conversation with McKittrick, if the First and Second Events entailed, respectively, 'the origin of the universe and the explosion of all forms of biological life' (p25), then the excavation at Blombos of a 100,000 year-old workshop containing tools used in the creation of paints indexes a Third Event: the inauguration of practices that facilitate 'the symbolic transformation of biological identity' (p67, emphasis in original). In other words, humanness emerges from a dynamic of rebirth. We're born into the world as biological beings and then reborn into an origin story that tells us who 'we' are and what 'we' do. …