Introduction
Today, the Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter is considered a seminal critical theorist. Yet many contemporary studies of her voluminous writings pay little attention to her Caribbean formation in Jamaica and her deep interactions with a Caribbean diaspora in London during the 1950s/1960s. Wynter’s Caribbean formation was embedded within a radical anti-colonial Caribbean intellectual tradition, and then merged in the 1970s with the African American radical intellectual tradition. In acknowledging this, three points come to mind that are worth specific elaboration. Firstly, why are we discussing Wynter today, what is her relevance? Secondly, what connections can be made from Wynter to Black Metamorphosis, the unpublished, 1970s, 970-page manuscript that myself, a group of graduate students, and young professors are editing as a contribution to Black critical theory and radical Caribbean thought. Thirdly, I want to briefly reflect on an essay she wrote on Bob Marley.
In this exercise, I begin with a set of caveats. I am not presenting Wynter as an intellectual god, nor someone we cannot disagree with or somebody that we cannot critique. Rather, I want to present elements of her work as generative. I present aspects of her thought as one possible line of radical thinking that may be useful in this current moment, a moment which is still embedded in deep neoliberalism. As well, I want to make some connections between Wynter’s current configuration of thought and her relationship to radical anti-colonial Caribbean thought. These ideas are presented, therefore, as but one attempt to theorise this tradition and the times we inhabit.
Caribbean Radical Anti-Colonial Thought
Sylvia Wynter belongs to a tradition of radical Caribbean anti-colonial thinkers and practitioners. This is a tradition of thought and practices which historically attempted to do two things. Firstly, it sought to overthrow the epistemological privilege of European thought as universal thought, what George Lamming recently called, “Europe as the only universal teacher.”1 Secondly, this Caribbean tradition attempted to create political practices which decolonized the politics of different Caribbean nations, as part of the political independence project, by positing different forms of sovereignty. Part of this political practice was a preoccupation with radical forms of democracy.2 In thinking about this complex tradition, I make a distinction between anti-colonial nationalist thought, with its objective of the creation of a nation state through the processes of constitutional decolonisation, and radical anti-colonial thought. With the former, the key was a process generated to create a constitutionally independent nation state and forms of national-flag sovereignty. On the other hand, radical anti-colonial thinkers had a different set of political ideas. They were preoccupied not just with the nation state and with sovereignty, but with the transformation of the societies in which they operated. The names of the individuals within this tradition are legendary: Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Claudia Jones, Suzanne Césaire, Wilfredo Lam, George Lamming, Maryse Condé, and CLR James, just to name a few. It is in this tradition of radical anti-colonial Caribbean thought that I wish to locate Wynter.
I begin with Wynter as a radical anti-colonial thinker because one of the issues in our contemporary moment is how the historical residues of settler colonialism and racial slavery, in general, shape political practice and discourse. Wynter’s work initially draws its sources from the Caribbean and is, today, a critical resource of radical thought. Importantly, radical anti-colonialism practices and the thinkers who were engaged in this tradition created an epistemological revolution and rupture with conventional radical theory. At the heart of that epistemological rupture is the question of the human. Here we might well recall Fanon’s final concluding chapter in The Wretched of the Earth. “Come let’s leave Europe alone,” he says, “to create a new Man.”3 Recall as well the writings of Aimé Césaire in his remarkable text Discourse on Colonialism, and then Lamming’s work around these questions, particularly in the novel Season of Adventure, where there is a profound discussion in the opening between Powell and Crim around the issues of language and questions of being human.
As well, let us not ignore Wilfredo Lam’s artistic work as he attempted to grapple with Afro-religious practices in Cuba alongside his various efforts to rethink questions, not only of Afro-Cuban religious practices, but of Blackness and being human in Cuba. Finally, we need to be attentive to the writings of the Haitian intellectual Jean Price-Mars from 1928 onwards and his attempts to redefine Haitian culture.4
All of these practices of thought were singularly about a distinctive reclamation of the human. This was not the human of Western thought, a philosophical anthropological conception of the human shaped by various European Enlightenments, mired in racial classification schemas and with Cartesian splits between mind and body. Rather, the question of the human was a deep political and social one, in part driven by a form of domination in which the colonised was non-human, as well as practices of refusals by the colonised, which often circled around the vindication of being human. As such, this question of the human was also, not only, an issue of ontology, that is to say, the question of being. Why?
Within the practices of colonialism in all its shapes and forms, there was the drive to create various hierarchical, classificatory schemas of the human. These schemas were about creating regimes of man. These regimes were constructed around who was human and who was not human. In these classifications, Africans were heathen, therefore not human. Indigenous peoples were heathen, but by nature could be called “natural men”, at least some of them, some of the time.5 What Wynter attempted to do in her work by developing different conceptions of man, beginning with notions of Christian man, political man, and then homo economicus man, reconfigured the ways we think about history. This paradigmatic shift by Wynter creates a different ground from which we begin to think about history.6 Her work troubles a historiography which is predicated in an understanding of history as a linear progression within the Marxist frame that is rooted in a formulation of modes of production. Wynter’s thought over- turns the Marxist analysis of the modes of history, and argues for what I call modes of being human.
Instead of thinking primarily about political economy through Marxist categories, she begins to examine ways of life and practices of human beings and how they constitute a society.7 This does not mean that the economy in her work is dismissed from any theoretical analysis of society. As Stuart Hall argues, because there is no production in general, there is historical specificity. Thus a society needs to be understood in terms of the reproduction of the “social relationships of production”. Wynter takes this argument one step further by submitting that these social relations generate conceptions of the human.
This different historiography of Wynter, one which defines modes of being human and ways of life, generates distinctive ways to think about the human species itself. Secondly, and this a critique of Wynter’s work, if one begins to think about modes of being human, then there is no telos for the human species to arrive at. In other words, there is no final human to recover. I would argue for a case in which the human is always in motion even if that figure of the human is constructed as we happen to be. As well, by grappling with the modes of being human as a series of practices, then another important element of Wynter’s thought emerges—the work and function of narrative. That is to say how we tell the stories of what we are. How do we create the explanatory grounds for a set of practices in which we engage? For Wynter, what distinguishes the human as a figure is the capacity and history of narrativity. She notes in her most recent essay “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-) Cognition”, that, for her, the form of emancipation which she is working through theoretically is one which will set out “at long last, the autonomy of our species, that is, Homo Narrans”.
However, I would like to insert a formulation here which complicates Wynter’s work. In this formulation, I do not make any distinction between word and deed. In fact, I’m collapsing them into an intimate dialectical relationship. I do so because I think that it is important, following Aimé Césaire, that one grapples with both the word and the deed simultaneously. When this occurs, then the figure of the human as a series of enactments, always in the making, appears. What bourgeois colonial thought has done, in its own classification schema, is to create and establish a logic in the contemporary world in which the human could mean only two things. Firstly, a figure that is homo economicus, and, secondly, a figure that can only operate within the field of white supremacy and capitalism. I have presented here, in broad strokes, some of the critical ideas of Wynter. At the core of these is the preoccupation with the human as a figure. I think that this preoccupation should be understood as rooted in some of the thematic preoccupations of radical anti-colonial Caribbean thought.
The Present Moment
In the present moment of neoliberalism revolution, one that Stuart Hall has called “an ideological revolution about what we are”, I suggest that a radical anti-colonial history, or a radical anti-colonial telling or narrative which focuses on the modes of being hu-
man, might be productive as an opening breach, as a break with the universalism of the West. Wynter’s preoccupation with the human, while being part of a series of questions raised in the radical anti-colonial thought, is one which faces us today, while neoliberalism, as a form of power, seeks to organise our desires and imagination in ways which would fundamentally alter the tentative ground on which the figure of human and the planet rest today.
My second point about Wynter’s relates to her remarkable text, Black Metamorphosis. Here I take a step back. Firstly, in discussing this text, I want to situate Wynter in the 1970s at a moment when she was completing the writing of Black Metamorphosis in the United States. By this time, she had migrated from Jamaica in the early 1970s, and as part of her move to the US, she was both working and in dialogue with black radicals who were associated with the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. The Institute of the Black World was a remarkable grouping of black radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s led by the late historian Vincent Harding. During this period, as mass black struggles (civil rights and black power) began to enter a period of downturn, this cluster of black radicals engaged in the process of reimagining black struggle internationally.8 In the group were individuals like Walter Rodney, CLR James, George Beckford, Vincent Harding, St. Clair Drake, Robert Hill, William Strickland, and Joyce Ladner. Wynter joined the group in the 1970s and sat on the board for a number of years.
Why am I mentioning this Institute? A great deal of the time when we think about Wynter’s work it is almost understood as springing from nowhere. Often, in accounts of her work, there seems to be no kind of influence, or any currents that actually shape her work. I do not want to detail all the currents that shape her work in Jamaica,9 but I think it is necessary to address a particular current in the United States that shaped her work in the 1970s—the Institute of the Black World.
The Institute of the Black World did a number of remarkable things, one of which was the establishment of summer schools in 1971 conducted under the title “New Concepts for the New Man”. In the summer schools, the following individuals taught courses: Walter Rodney, Bill Strickland, St. Clair Drake, and Joyce Ladner. This is how the summer school was advertised:
We at The Institute of the Black World, IBW, believe with Fanon, that to create a new humanity, Black men and women must break the shackles of our past thoughts and actions, and we must confront the stark reality of our present existence and generate new concepts for the new relationship of man to man.10
Given this advertisement, I do not think that it is far-fetched to say that the IBW was one of the key influences on Wynter. Indeed, I want to posit that as she began her travels in the United States, and her process of grappling with the issues of blackness and anti-black racism in the United States, her ideas were being shaped by her involvement with the Institute. From this perspective, I would suggest the following things.
When Wynter was working with the Institute of the Black World, what began to happen was that her radical anti-colonial thought merged with elements of the Black Radical Tradition in its African American genre. This meant that Wynter’s work in the late 1970s was a configuration shaped by a confluence of currents that were not just anti-colonial, which she drew from her time in London, England, and her growing up in Jamaica. Additionally, she was drawing from the Black Radical Intellectual Tradition typified by the IBW. These currents congeal in her work and provide the ground for the numerous versions of Black Metamorphosis which she writes during the 1970s. Importantly as well, I suggest that there is a reworking of her thought around the concept of culture. That while in her articles in Jamaica Journal she posits the centrality of culture as a terrain on which Afro-Jamaican life can be grasped, in her dialogues at the IBW and in Black Metamorphosis she elaborates a distinctive form of radical black politics rooted in Afro-Diasporic cultures.
The Text
It is within this particular political and discursive context that I want to briefly address Black Metamorphosis, the 970-page book not yet published. It is a text which was written over several years and, based on research, has about four versions. In this brief discussion, I pay attention to three elements of the text.
The first is that, within the text, one needs to be attentive to the ways in which Wynter breaks with Marxism. This is very important because in London and in Jamaica, before she comes to the United States, she is a Marxist. She does not beat a drum about it, but if you read her carefully and the various articles published in numerous journals, Jamaica Journal, Savacou and New World, you will see that for her, Marxism as a mode of thinking is very important.11 In Black Metamorphosis, she breaks with Marxism. The break begins when she starts to think about not just the relationship to race and class, but when she begins to examine questions of culture and enslaved labour. What is fascinating in this text is that the first segment is devoted to an extremely rigourous reading of capitalism. Not from the point of view of Marx, but from the point of view of the enslaved on the plantation, as well as that of New World Caribbean political economy, particularly the writings of George Beckford on the plantation.12 Her argument, to put it succinctly, in the text was that capitalism emerged with the creation of the plantation, not with the English factory system. Now, I have a particular disagreement with her, because I think capitalism emerges before that, but it does not matter. What matters is that she is rewriting the actual emergence of capitalism and how it relates to New World slavery and plantations.13
Secondly, in the text, Wynter explores the ways in which Black culture works as a process of both refashioning and rehumanisation for the enslaved. The book is called Black Metamorphosis for a reason. What she argues is that the enslaved arrived in the New World and they are transformed into an African diaspora, and that transformation into an African diaspora is illuminated primarily on the terrains of religion and culture. For her, Afro-Caribbean religions are crucial as one ground for a counter-symbolic order produced by the refusal processes engaged during colonialism and the racial enslavement of Black people. Whether it is Afro-Christianity in the United States, or Afro-Caribbean religions such as Vodou, Santeria or Shango, these forms now become the terrains on which Black people begin to rehumanise themselves. That rehumanizing of self means that the enslaved is also engaged in a process of “indigenization”. In this formulation, there are many arguments taking place, but I will just mention two of them that we might want to think about.
One of them is her argument against Melville Herskovits around African retentions in Caribbean and the American South.14 The other argument is one in which she critiques various theories of creolization which were then popular in the Caribbean. In this regard, her adversary is the seminal Caribbean thinker and poet Kamau Brathwaite. In opposition to the arguments about African retentions and creolization, she posits the concept of indigenization, which comes from her reading of the book by Jean PriceMars, the Haitian anthropologist, So Spoke the Uncle (1928). So alongside her break with formal Marxism, from this text Wynter is developing theoretical concepts of Black culture and its expressions in the Americas. However, it should be noted that, in the final analysis, currents of Marx’s method remain in her thought. For example, there continues to be certain grammar of Marx and Hegel that remains in her work, specifically around the notions of totality and telos. What is clear, though, is that in this moment of the 1970s, her idea about indigenization became generative in her discussion of African American cultural life, the blues, jazz, and the so-called Negro spiritual. This is discerned in her readings of Baraka and her readings of blues and jazz as liberatory cultural forces. All of this allows us to grasp how Wynter’s understanding of Blackness expands from its Caribbean beginnings.
In this particular engagement with Black Metamorphosis, what we perhaps should understand is how Wynter becomes not just an anti-colonial thinker, but actually becomes a part of the Black Radical Tradition. Once she began to think of Blackness, she began to think of the enslaved as both labour and capital. She began to think about the questions of Blackness as lack, of Blackness as being non-human, and the Black enslaved both as exchange value and use value. All this meant that Wynter began to give us a different story of the history of capitalism long before the academy began to frame the study of racial slavery and capitalism under the term racial capitalism. For Wynter, there was now a different logic and ground of history. This history can be discerned in the enslaved thingfication process, refusals and processes of rehumanisation defined through a logic of freedom from domination, rather than a proletariat/labour exploitation/human emancipation one. From this perspective, a different understanding of the human as a figure emerges.
What is fascinating to me is how this engagement is done through an exploration of culture as well as a critical engagement with Marx, while paying really deep attention to issues of labour. This different story of capitalism, its emergence and functioning push- es us to search for a different set of logics about what Black freedom might actually look like. Additionally, I would note that in one section of the manuscript, she begins to search for language which would theoretically describe this new historiography which she posits. Thus, she moves back and forth between calling the mode of production in the Caribbean and the American South a slave mode of production, suggesting sometimes that this might be a variant of capitalism. Here, one is reminded of Fanon’s remark that when it comes to the colonies one has to “stretch Marx”.
In grappling with Wynter’s thought, we know that this discomfort with Marxism emerged in Guyana in the 1960s, when on seeing the manipulated, external, imperial intervention of the USA that led to conflict between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, she noted in an interview with David Scott in Small Axe, “My Marxism could not explain that.” What one should note is how the manuscript draws on Jamaican culture, particularly on dance and the practices of Rastafari. Given this, it is safe to say that during this period Wynter was working through a theory of Black culture and its relationship to radical politics. In the text, she would try to find the site of a radical politics of culture that could transform a society.
The Marley Essay
The essay in which she elaborates this radical politics of culture is a1977 essay titled “We Know Where We Are from Mayalism to the Politics of Black Culture”. What does she write in this particular text about Marley and about Blackness?
Black hair, Black skin is re-evaluated as a sign, not an index. One can have Black skin and be a heathen (talking about Marley), one can have white skin and have a black heart, or to the knowledge of the self or the sons of Jah (in Rastafari) as such cease to perceive the self as white.
What point is she making here? A new symbolic order and semantic field displaces the hierarchy of the dominant order in which whiteness operates like noble blood. She posits that at the core of what she calls the counter-symbolic order of Rasta in the 1970s is a form of radical Blackness. My point is that the politics of Wynter in 1977 became one in which the politics of creating a counter-symbolic order was primary. Later on in her work, she created forms of radical sociology, drawing on the concept of liminal groups, from the works of anthropologists like Victor Turner and Asmarom Legesse, and then later on from social groups such as the “new poor” which were emerging. This line of thought in my view is a continuation of a certain tradition which we see in her writings in the Jamaica Journal.
In the end, what am I arguing? What I am arguing is that there are distinctive phases in the evolution of Wynter’s critical thought, but the phase that I have tried to discuss, briefly, is the moment when there was a transformation of her radical anti-colonial thinking and its merger with the African American Black Radical Tradition. Within that moment of merger, she began to think through and reformulate this question of the human and culture.
Is the question of the human not one of the central issues of our times? Not the business of who we are, but what we are? What we have become, and what might we become? Is this not the moment in which we have to ask these fundamental questions, not just because of COVID-19, but also because of the ecological dangers in the world that shape our everyday lives, and the deep inequalities which mark all societies as well those which exist between societies? Does all of this not point to a question: What is it that we are, and what is it that we need to do, to be able to live a different life?
Recall Fanon’s comment “that Europe has butchered what is most important in ‘man’—freedom”. My argument is that the Black Radical Tradition and the anti-colonial tradition have been working to create new practices of freedom from a ground which reframes what it means to be human. Both of these traditions have been engaged with exploring alternative conceptions of freedom for us to have a more of a life as human beings in this world. Wynter’s work is a defining part of these traditions.
This essay is in part a lecture delivered at Dartmouth College in 2022. Thanks to Donald Pease for the invitation.
- Unpublished interview with George Lamming, June 2021.
- The richness of this Caribbean tradition in its anglophone dimensions is discussed in Denis Benn, The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, 1774–2003 (2004); the francophone tradition in Nick Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (2013). The Hispanic tradition is discussed in Silvio Torres-Saillant, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006). For the clearest exposition of mass democracy in the Caribbean, see CLR James, Party Politics in the West Indies (1984).
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
- The work of Jean Price-Mars is critical in understanding Wynter’s work. His book So Spoke the Uncle (1928) was generative in the emergence of the literary and artistic movement of indigenism in early 20th century Haiti during the American occupation. Wynter, in her many articles published in Jamaica Journal, draws heavily from this work. It frames her critiques of theories of creolization and of cultural pluralism in Caribbean social sciences during the 1970s.
- For a discussion of this, see Anthony Padgen, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethology (1987).
- For these conceptions of the various regimes of Man which Wynter develops, see various essays in Anthony Bogues (ed.) After Man, Towards the Human—Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter (2006), in particular Neil Roberts, “Sylvia Wynter’s Hedgehog: The Challenge for Intellectuals to Create New ‘Forms of Life’ in Pursuit of Freedom.”
- This aspect of Wynter’s thought is in line with that of many Caribbean radicals who, while deeply influenced by Marx, make attempts to rework the issue of the material and the role of the economy in their thought. For example, Stuart Hall in the 1970s was preoccupied with working through this question in his articles “Marx’s Notes on Method: A Reading of the 1857 Introduction” and the essay “Rethinking the Base and Superstructure Metaphor”. Both essays are published in Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Marxism (2021).
- For a very good description of the Institute, see Derrick White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (2011). It was at the summer school of the Institute that Walter Rodney delivered a series of important lectures, and CLR James in 1971 delivered his remarkable three-part lectures on the Black Jacobins. These lectures were published in Small Axe No 8 (September 2000). As well, the Institute published a path-breaking volume on education and Black struggle which included an essay by Richard Small and Robert Hill about the little-known radical small farmer, and political leader from Clarendon, Robert Rumble.
- This aspect of her work will be part of a larger intellectual biography of Wynter which is now in progress. Anthony Bogues, The Critical Theory of Sylvia Wynter and the Politics of the Human (2024).
- IBW advertisement for summer school, 1971.
- These essays are now published. Demetrious Eudell (ed.), We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays 1967– 1984 (2022).
- There is no doubt about the deep influence on Wynter of Beckford’s work. Doing research for her intellectual biography, I found in the box of the various versions of the Black Metamorphosis manuscript the 1971 unpublished work of Beckford, Foundations of Black Dispossession.
- My disagreement would centre around an historical account in which the moment of capital accumulation was not the plantation, but the transatlantic slave trade itself. All historical evidence now points to the emergence of various forms of capital institutional formation, stock markets, financial instruments like credit and insurance, as well as debt within the structures of the odious trade in “human commerce”.
- See his seminal work, Myth of the Negro Past (1941).