After Man, Towards the Human : Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter / Anthony Bogues, Editor P
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After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter i EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use ii EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Caribbean Reasonings iii EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use iv EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Caribbean Reasonings After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter edited by Anthony Bogues Ian Randle Publishers Kingston Miami v EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use First published in Jamaica, 2006 by Ian Randle Publishers 11 Cunningham Avenue Box 686 Kingston 6 www.ianrandlepublishers.com Preface, copyright selection and editorial material © 2006 Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Jamaica. After man, towards the human: critical essays on Sylvia Wynter . Copyright © 2006 by Anthony Bogues. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any informa- tion storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Ian Randle Publishers. After man, towards the human : critical essays on Sylvia Wynter / Anthony Bogues, editor p. ; cm. – (Caribbean Reasonings) Collection of some of the papers presented at the Seminar ‘After Man – the thought of Sylvia Wynter’. – Includes index ISBN 976-637-224-1 (pbk) Epub Edition @ September 2013 ISBN: 978-976-637-741-0 1. Caribbean literature — Women authors – History and criticism 2. Women in literature — History and criticism 3. Caribbean literature — 20th century – History and criticism 4. Caribbean Area – Intellectual life 5. Critical Theory I. Bogues, Anthony II. Series 809.89278 dc 21 Cover photo by Francine B. Price Cover and Book design by Allison Brown Printed in the United States of America vi EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Series Editors Anthony Bogues Rupert Lewis Brian Meeks vii EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use viii EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use For Sylvia Wynter’s students in the Caribbean and the United States ix EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use x EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Table of Contents Preface .......................................................................................... xiii 1. Modernity and the ‘Work of History’ ................................... 1 Demetrius L. Eudell 2. Perceiving Reality in a New Way: Rethinking the Black/White Duality of Our Time ............... 25 Joyce E. King 3. Otherness and the Impossible in the Wake of Wynter’s Notion of the ‘After Man’ .................................... 57 Clevis Headley 4. The ‘S’ Word: Sex, Empire and Black Radical Tradition ............................ 76 Greg Thomas 5. After Man, Womens: The Third Sex or Ain’t i a Eunuch...... 100 Patricia D. Fox 6. Reading Said and Wynter on Liberation ............................. 131 Aaron K. Kamugisha 7. Sylvia Wynter’s Hedgehogs: The Challenge for Intellectuals to Create New ‘Forms of Life’ in Pursuit of Freedom ................................ 157 Neil Roberts 8. Notes on the Current Status of Liminal Categories and the Search for a New Humanism ......................................... 190 Nelson Maldonado-Torres xi EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 9. Biocentrism, Neo-Ptolemaicism, and E. O. Wilson’s Consilience: A Contemporary Example of ‘Saving the Phenomenon’ of Man, in the Name of the Human .................................. 209 Jason L.R. Ambroise 10. Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man? Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections .................................................. 237 Lewis R. Gordon 11. Wynter and the Transcendental Spaces of Carribbean Thought .............................................................................. 258 Paget Henry 12. Legitimizing Africa in Jamaica ............................................ 290 Nicosia Shakes 13. The Human, Knowledge and the Word: Reflecting on Sylvia Wynter .................................................. 315 Anthony Bogues Contributors ............................................................................... 339 Index .......................................................................................... 342 xii EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use Preface This edited volume is a collection of some of the papers presented at the seminar, ‘After Man, Towards The Human: The Thought of Sylvia Wynter’, held in June 2002 and hosted by the Africana Studies Department, Brown University and the Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona. The seminar marked the continuing collaboration between these two institutions and opened up a series of activities, which are fast becoming a central part of Caribbean intellectual life. It also brought together a wide cross section of scholars, graduate students and the Jamaican public for the first time to engage in a series of exchanges about Wynter’s rich oeuvre. This edited volume is the first in the book series Caribbean Reasonings and it is our hope that we will be able to produce a series of edited volumes, which will serve as critical guides to the Caribbean intellectual tradition and resources both for students and the general reader. Each volume will be edited by one of the series editors, Brian Meeks, Rupert Lewis or Anthony Bogues. It is perhaps fitting that we should begin the series with essays on the thought of Sylvia Wynter. Sylvia Wynter, Professor Emerita of Spanish, Portuguese, African and Afro-American Studies, Stanford University, is one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished intellectuals. From her major essay published in Jamaica Journal in 1968, ‘We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections On West Indian Writing and Criticism’ to her most recently published essay, ‘Africa, The West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text After Man’, Wynter has staked out a ground for herself as one of the region’s premier cultural and social theorists. Professor Wynter’s work is characterized by a sophisticated theoretical acumen which is not only distinctively Caribbean in the ways it deals with the practice of writing and cultural criticism as forms of social practice, but by the very questions with which she grapples. From exciting and rigorous interventions on the nature of Caribbean culture, creative writing, ‘folk culture’ and its profound meaning for the symbolic universe of Caribbean reality, to her present genealogical critique of Western xiii EBSCOhost - printed on 5/12/2020 4:57 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use humanism, Wynter’s work locates her not just as a major Caribbean figure, but as a world class intellectual. Her work will, in future decades, be a rich source of investigation of some of the compelling questions that currently face humanity. Sylvia Wynter’s work can be divided roughly into three periods, which although distinct, are interconnected and inform each other, establishing a unique discursive practice. The first period involves the major essays published between 1968–72. These essays include ‘Novel and History: Plot and Plantation’, the seminal and polemical ‘Jonkonnu in Jamaica’, ‘Creole Criticism: A Critique’ and ‘One Love: Rhetoric or Reality –Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism’. During the 1970s Kamau Brathwaite called Wynter’s work an ‘indigenist critical practice’. In a profound sense, Wynter’s work forms part of that group of Caribbean intellectuals, including, notably, Roger Mais, George Lamming, Rex Nettleford and Kamau Brathwaite, who wrestled mightily to decipher the past and fashion a future in a language which was distinctively Caribbean. This group of intellectuals and writers laid the foundations for conceptualizations about the region that were internal while elaborating on an inventory of the region’s experience in its own language and categories. Like many other thinkers during this period, Wynter also functioned as a public intellectual, writing the framing document for Jamaica’s National Heroes and working with the Jamaica Journal. During this phase her major novel, Hills of Hebron,