Sylvia Wynter

ON BEING HUMAN AS PRAXIS

Katherine McKittrick, editor

 Sylvia Wynter
O N B E I N G H U MA N A S P R AX I S

Katherine McKittrick, ed.

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015

© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Arno Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sylvia Wynter : on being human as praxis / Katherine McKittrick, ed.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5820-6 (hardcover : alk. Paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5834-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Wynter, Sylvia. 2. Social sciences—Philosophy. 3. Civilization,
Modern—Philosophy. 4. Race—Philosophy. 5. Human
ecology—Philosophy. I. McKittrick, Katherine.
hm585.s95 2015
300.1—dc23
2014024286

isbn 978-0-8223-7585-2 (e-book)

Cover image: Sylvia Wynter, circa 1970s. Manuscripts, Archives

and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Canadian Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council (sshrc / Insight Grant)
which provided funds toward the publication of this book.
For Ellison
CON TE NTS

ix ACK N OW LED GMENTS

Katherine McKittrick
1 CHAPTER 1 Yours in the Intellectual Struggle:
Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living

Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick

9 CHAPTER 2 Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?
Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations

Denise Ferreira da Silva

90 CHAPTER 3 Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the
Modern Episteme

Walter D. Mignolo
106 CHAPTER 4 Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Bench Ansfield
124 CHAPTER 5 Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban
Redevelopment

Katherine McKittrick
142 CHAPTER 6 Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix,
and the Promise of Science

Nandita Sharma
164 CHAPTER 7 Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization
 Rinaldo Walcott
183 CHAPTER 8 Genres of Human: Multiculturalism, Cosmo-politics,
and the Caribbean Basin

Carole Boyce Davies

203 CHAPTER 9 From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cultural
Resistance and the Rehumanizing Project

Demetrius L. Eudell
226 C H A P T E R 10 “Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing”: The Sociogenic
Principle and the Being of Being Black / Human

249 B I B L I OGR APHY

275 CON T R I BUTORS
277 INDEX

viii Contents
ACKN OWLE D GMEN TS

The rule is love.

SYLVIA WYNTER, MASKARADE

It is difficult to imagine this book as a complete and bounded work. While

writing and reading and editing and sharing ideas—processes and con-
versations that have unfolded since about 2006 yet began well before this
time—the text and its ideas have been consistently ajar. It has also wit-
nessed, across the planet and with uneven responses, the Arab Spring and
ongoing struggles in Syria, increasing man-made disasters and resource ex-
ploitation, wide use of unmanned drones, credit crises, the Occupy move-
ments and student protests, the preventable deaths of Troy Davis, Michael
Jackson, Mark Duggan, Whitney Houston, Trayvon Martin, and more, the
election of Barack Obama, Idle No More, prisoner strikes in Atlanta, Cali-
fornia. . . . Indeed, in Toronto, Ontario, where I write from and dwell, and
in Kingston, Ontario, the prison-university town where I teach, and across
Canada, prisons are, quietly and not, proliferating fictionally benevolent ge-
ographies. The 2012 Marikana (Lonmin) strike—the protest of a variety of
appalling work conditions—resulted in miners being threatened and killed,
reminiscent of, but not twinning, the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. I hope
these kinds of events, and the many more unlisted—and it is worth under-
scoring the asymmetrical time-place reverberations of the events noted and
unspoken and yet-to-come—in some small way connect to this work, thus
drawing attention to the ways in which the ideas put forth are incomplete
and unbounded and grounded and, to use Sylvia Wynter’s phraseology,
correlational. Our work is unfinished.
 Any engagement with Sylvia Wynter demands openness. And without
the support, conversations, words, creativity, hospitality, commitment,
and energy of Sylvia Wynter—her openness to my ideas and this book,
and her willingness to return to many conversations left ajar—this project
would not have materialized and with this found spaces to critically exam-
ine and imagine the unlisted and the unspoken, the yet-to-come, and our
unrealized futures. More than this, Sylvia’s generosity, coupled with her
prodigious knowledge and commitment to meticulously mapping out big
ideas in very particular ways, tore up and tore open my mind and my heart
as our conversations provided, at least for me, a new context within which
to envision radical collaborative and correlational narratives. More specif-
ically, the dialogue, formalized in the chapter “Unparalleled Catastrophe
for Our Species?” but underlying the text as a whole, not only is founded
on Wynter’s invaluable intellectual mentorship and call-and-response but
also signals the difficult task of situating our intellectual questions outside
our present system of knowledge in order to historicize and share our fu-
tures differently. I learned and continue to learn a lot from Sylvia—about
reading, writing, and friendship, about the high styles and the low styles,
about the intellectual life her generation of Caribbean intellectuals amassed,
about the science of the word, and about the difficulties of waiting and the
pleasures of anticipation. This editor, then, ajar, extends warm appreciation
to Sylvia for her ongoing friendship and conversations.
Wading through the openness of not quite arriving at the yet-to-come,
and arriving again and again—stopping, too—in our unfinished histo-
ries, as these time-space processes are generated from the perspective of
the ex-slave archipelago: many colleagues and friends have interrupted and
stopped and dwelled on the ideas put forth. The essayists, I thank, for shar-
ing their ideas and for writing challenging pieces that will enhance how we
read the work of Wynter and engage decolonial scholarship.
Rinaldo Walcott has worked on this book with me, inside and out,
since I began dreaming it. In addition to contributing his ideas within, he
was an early interlocutor with Wynter, in Oakland, California, in 2007.
This project would be very different if Rinaldo, a stalwart intellectual and
stellar friend, did not imagine it with me. I appreciate Rinaldo’s critical
engagement, his thoughtful insights, and his willingness to engage the
creative-intellectual-physiological contours of black life with me. His ideas
inspire, and he made this work believable for me, in a world where blackness
is an unbelievable and surprising wonder.

x Acknowledgments
 In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, many have pro-
vided different kinds of maps and spatial clues and nourishment and con-
versation and support: Simone Browne, Hazel Carby, Ted Gordon, Mat-
thew Mitchelson, Nick Mitchell, Priscilla McCutcheon, Amy Trauger, Abdi
Osman, Nik Heynen, Richard Iton, Paul Gilroy, Vron Ware, Thomas Zach-
arias, Joao Costa Vargas, Omi Osun Olomo, Ben Carrington, Ned Morgan,
Austin Clarke, Linda Peake, Joy James, Jafari Allen, Anne Brierley, Leslie
Sanders, Ruthie Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Jason Weidemann, Mark Camp-
bell, Clyde Woods, Dina Georgis, Michelle Wright, Aaron Kamuguisha,
Jenny Burman, Barnor Hesse, Christopher Smith.
Traveling between the Ontario cities of Toronto and Kingston, I have
had the pleasure of working and thinking with a number of migratory sub-
jects as well as members of Frontenac and Prince Edward Counties: Bev-
erley Mullings, James Miller, Margaret Little, Anastasia Riehl, Hitay Yükse-
ker, Scott Morgan Straker, Christopher Fanning, Terrie Easter Sheen, Scott
Morgensen, Dana Olwan, Barrington Walker, Sammi King, Elaine Power,
Eleanor MacDonald, Magda Lewis. I have also had the incredible oppor-
tunity to teach and be inspired by many students at Queen’s University in
Kingston, Ontario, with Carla Moore, Naomi Mukai, Jasmine Abdelhadi,
Aruna Boodram, Darcel Bullen, Kathryn Travis, Maya Stistki, Katherine
Mazurok, AJ Paynter, Stephanie Simpson, Ei Phyu Han, and Yasmine Djer-
bal really standing out as challenging and exciting scholars.
In addition to Wynter’s writings, the work and ideas of Edouard Glis-
sant, Rinaldo Walcott, Hazel Carby, Prince, Alexander Weheliye, Richard
Iton, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, TV on the Radio, Hortense Spillers, Betty
Davis, Nas, Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhabha, David Scott, Michael Jackson,
Robin D. G. Kelly, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, Frantz Fanon, Octavia
Butler, Kanye West, M. NourbeSe Philip, Zadie Smith, Ebony Bones, Chris-
tina Sharpe, Clyde Woods, Stevie Wonder, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Roberta
Flack, YellowStraps, PJ Harvey, Nina Simone, Kara Walker, Chandra Mo-
hanty, Marvin Gaye, Willie Bester, Aimé Césaire, Lil’ Kim, Audre Lorde,
Chimamanda Adichie, Simone Browne, Edward Said, Donny Hathaway,
Mark Campbell, Millie Jackson, Kara Keeling, Angela Davis, Etta James,
Gayatri Gopinath, Fred Moten, W. E. B. DuBois, Lisa Lowe, Dionne Brand,
Jimi Hendrix, Drexicya, and Stuart Hall, among many others, have allowed
me to think big about the intimacies among social justice, creativity, writing,
and racial politics. What newness and strangeness and love and sadness and
soul so many creative-intellectual ideas bring forth again and again!

Acknowledgments xi
 Friends, family, and colleagues, too, who have had an eye on this project
since it began and have brought their spirited support to the work within—
in essay form and not: Alexander Weheliye, Demetrius Eudell, Lisa Lowe,
the McKittricks and Zillis, across nomenclatures, and my mother, Valerie
Broderick, who insists we cherish the conviviality of recipes. Mark Campbell,
Jack Dresnick, Johanna Fraley, and Nick Mitchell each contributed to dif-
ferent portions of the long conversation between Wynter and McKittrick—
transcribing, editing, listening, responding, translating. I can only describe
this work as heavy work—difficult, thick, grave. The long conversation has
had many, many versions and several iterations, and all of these scholars
generously shared their time and ideas with both Sylvia and me between
2007 and 2014. Katherine Mazurok, Stephanie McColl, and Joanne Farall
also assisted with some tediously significant bibliographic details, which
I thank them for, immensely. Nick Mitchell and Jack Dresnick especially,
have been my constants-in-California, working closely with Sylvia but also
lending me their ears and ideas and inspiration. During his research at the
Institute of the Black World Archives at the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture, Nick also—to his surprise—came across the photograph
of Wynter that is used for the cover of this text. Ned Morgan, trusted long-
time friend, assisted with early copyedits.
At Duke University Press, Jade Brooks and Ken Wissoker have assisted
with many aspects of the manuscript, supporting the initial vision, admin-
istering the text at each stage, and allowing it to organically unfold while
also ensuring that the practicalities were accounted for. More than this,
their ongoing excitement about the collection has allowed me to work pa-
tiently with Wynter and her ideas and consider the manuscript, as a whole,
a meaningful and worthwhile project. What of Wynter without having time
to dwell with Wynter? The comments of the anonymous referees, greatly
appreciated, were perceptive, straightforward, and amazingly useful and
strengthened the overall manuscript.
The insights and support of the already and yet to be listed—Simone
Browne, Walcott, and Ray Zilli—have been especially relevant to my
ongoing preoccupation with the writings of Sylvia Wynter, and each has
differently lived with the discursive and affective outcomes that continue
to emerge as I read, write, and think the futures she offers. Zilli has, too,
made me at home with these and other difficult ideas by encouraging me
to keep unraveling and working them out—which, after many years and a

xii Acknowledgments
long-standing mistrust of the real and imagined geographies of home, pro-
vides a kind of comfortable but unsettling intellectual clarity that demands
unexpectedness. Ellison McKittrick Zilli witnessed the final stages of the
book and will, I hope, as dedicatee, keep the text, and the ideas Wynter
imparts, ajar.

Acknowledgments xiii
Katherine McKittrick

1 YOU R S I N T HE I N T ELLEC T UAL ST RU G G L E

Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of the Living

Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle
and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds,
deeds which crystallize our actualities. . . . And the maps of spring always
have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.
SYLVIA WYNTER, “THE POPE MUST HAVE BEEN DRUNK, THE KING OF CASTILE
A MADMAN”

People ask me, “Why don’t you write an autobiography?” But I have
never been able to think that way. My generation I think, would find it
impossible to emphasize the personal at the expense of the political.
SYLVIA WYNTER, “THE RE- ENCHANTMENT OF HUMANISM: AN INTERVIEW
WITH SYLVIA WYNTER”

The epigraphs that begin this introduction draw attention to a challenge:

How to introduce the analytical, creative, and intellectual projects of Sylvia
Wynter, as well as her biographical narrative, all at once, while also looking
forward, noncircuitously and without anticipatory repetition, to the essays
and conversations within? The challenge folds over, too, to notice the ex-
tensive and detailed corpus Wynter has put forth—more than two hundred
texts and presentations—which comprise dramatic plays, translations, es-
says, plenaries, symposia, and creative works.1 Her work speaks to a range of
topics and ideas that interweave fiction, physics, neurobiology, film, music,
economics, history, critical theory, literature, learning practices, coloniality,
ritual narratives, and religion and draw attention to epistemological rup-
tures such as the secularization of humanism, the Copernican leap, Darwin-
ian modes of biological representation, Fanonian sociogeny, the 1960s. The
depth with which she reads texts and her innovative approach to thinking
through the ways in which we live and tell our stories have resulted in an
intellectual oeuvre that patiently attends to the ways in which our specific
conception of the human, Man, curtails alterative models of being, the
fullness of our interrelated human realization, and a new science of human
discourse. Across her creative texts and her essays, Wynter demonstrates
the ways in which a new, revalorized perspective emerges from the ex-slave
archipelago and that this worldview, engendered both across and outside a
colonial frame, holds in it the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not
replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.
While readers unfamiliar with Wynter’s work can turn to any number of
her essays and enter the conversation from a variety of perspectives, much
of her vast and detailed writing life is tracked and explored by both Wyn-
ter and David Scott in his incredible interview, “The Re-enchantment of
Humanism,” in Small Axe.2 In this interview Wynter’s experiences as an an-
ticolonial figure emerge not as inciting the political vision put forth in her
writings but rather as implicit to a creative-intellectual project of reimagining
what it means to be human and thus rearticulating who / what we are. The
process of rearticulation is important to highlight because it underscores re-
lationality and interhuman narratives. Here, the question-problem-place of
blackness is crucial, positioned not outside and entering into modernity but
rather the empirical-experiential-symbolic site through which modernity
and all of its unmet promises are enabled and made plain. With this, stands
Wynter’s subjective-local-specific-diasporic anticolonial unautobiography
(see the second epigraph here), articulated alongside the physiological—
neurochemical-induced—wording of hope and desire within the context
of total domination (see the first epigraph). Beside phylogeny and ontogeny
stands sociogeny / a new science of the word.3
Wynter’s anticolonial vision is not, then, teleological—moving from co-
lonial oppression outward and upward toward emancipation—but rather
consists of knots of ideas and histories and narratives that can only be leg-
ible in relation to one another. Here it is crucial to notice that her oeuvre
can be compared to and in conversation with Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon,
W. E. B. DuBois, Elsa Goveia, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, C. L. R.
James, and Edouard Glissant, among others; this is an intellectual project
that, therefore, practices co-identification and cocitation and honors the
conceptual frame it promises. It is through reading across texts and genres,

2 Katherine McKittrick
knitting together and critically engaging a variety of intellectual narratives
from the natural sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, and art worlds,
as these insights are produced in the shadow of colonialism, that Wynter’s
anticolonial insights come forth. These knots of histories and ideas and
relational narratives, together, emerge in different ways throughout this
collection. Painstakingly avoiding an overview of key themes in Wynter’s
work—Man1, Man2, sociogeny, the science of the word, propter nos, auto-
poiesis, counterdoctrines, adaptive truths, archipelagos of poverty—I draw
the reader’s attention to the essays within, which touch on, extend, and con-
verse with these concepts and, in very different ways, join Wynter in open-
ing up the possibility of a new science of human discourse: “a sense that
in every form that is being inscripted, each of us is also in that form, even
though we do not experience it. So the human story / history becomes the
collective story / history of these multiple forms of self-inscription or self-
instituted genres, with each form / genre being adaptive to its situation, eco-
logical, geopolitical.”4

The Essays
This is a project that speaks to the interrelatedness of our contemporary
situation and our embattled histories of conflicting and intimate relation-
alities. The project is about how our long history of racial violence contin-
ues to inform our lives and our anticolonial and decolonial struggles. The
work thinks about and interrogates how the figure of Man—in Wynter’s
formulations—is the measuring stick through which all other forms of be-
ing are measured. And, it is a work that seeks to ethically question and undo
systems of racial violence and their attendant knowledge systems that pro-
duce this racial violence as “commonsense.” This is not a project of reviling
and thus replacing Man-as-human with an ascendant figure; rather it draws
attention to a counterexertion of a new science of being human and the
emancipatory breach Wynter’s work offers. The writers here work closely
with the writings of Sylvia Wynter, bringing into focus the ways in which
she asks us to think carefully about the ways in which those currently inhab-
iting the underside of the category of Man-as-human—under our current
epistemological regime, those cast out as impoverished and colonized and
undesirable and lacking reason—can, and do, provide a way to think about
being human anew. Being human, in this context, signals not a noun but
a verb. Being human is a praxis of humanness that does not dwell on the
static empiricism of the unfittest and the downtrodden and situate the most

Yours in the Intellectual Struggle 3

marginalized within the incarcerated colonial categorization of oppression;
being human as praxis is, to borrow from Maturana and Varela, “the reali-
zation of the living.”5
The collection begins with the dialogic text “Unparalleled Catastrophe
for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversa-
tions” (cited in this introduction simply as “Conversations”). Building on a
discussion and interview that began in 2007, Katherine McKittrick has since
spoken and written with Wynter about various aspects of her research and
writing. A call-and-response, this piece might be thought of as an extended
prologue to the collection: a narrative that sets the stage for the collection’s
essays by drawing attention to key themes and concepts in Wynter’s work;
and, a prefatory conversation that highlights Wynter’s voice within the con-
text of the collection as a whole. Indeed, the call-and-response is doubled,
with Wynter and McKittrick “calling” and “responding” to one another in
“Conversations,” while “Conversations” provides a context for the remain-
ing essays that, as a whole, bounce off of, riff toward, and particularize Wyn-
ter’s larger project. As it contextualizes the collection as a whole, “Conver-
sations” is also a narrative that extends beyond Wynter’s earlier writings.
Completed in early 2014, it begins the collection but might also be read as a
text that closes the collection and opens up Wynter’s most recent insights—
for it is here that she pushes us to think carefully about the ways in which
our capacity to produce narrative as physiological beings allows us to criti-
cally re-envision our futures in new and provocative ways.
This is followed by two essays that work through the broader concep-
tual claims that Sylvia Wynter makes in relation to colonialism, coloniality,
history, and the ethics of being human. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Before
Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme,” is one of the first
discussions to think extensively about Wynter’s research alongside that of
Michel Foucault. In her essay, Silva traces Wynter’s reading of the ways in
which a racial presence is necessary to the expansion, development, and
implementation of imperial order and the production of Man-as-human.
Here, as in Wynter’s work, Silva puts pressure on Foucault’s archaeology
of knowledge and tables of difference by drawing attention to the ways in
which the violence of conquest and colonization are implicit to moder-
nity. Walter Mignolo’s contribution, “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean
to Be Human?,” explores the cognitive shifts incited by Copernican and
Darwinian epochs in order to address the ways in which Sylvia Wynter’s
project itself is situated outside our present order of knowledge. Wynter’s

4 Katherine McKittrick
perspective and therefore her reading practices, he suggests, are decolonial
scientia in that she situates herself beyond the crass body politics of colonial
knowledge in order to foster adjoined human needs. Mignolo’s essay traces
the ways in which Wynter’s unveiling of reality—as a naturalized autopoi-
etic social system—allows her to read particular moments, from C. L. R.
James’s Marxism and Fanon’s sociogeny to 1492 and the rise of scientific
reason, anew.
Bench Ansfield’s “Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Rede-
velopment,” draws on Wynter’s insights to think through the ways in which
urban recovery projects and urban studies approaches to post-Katrina New
Orleans are bound up in a teleological promise that reproduces sites of
blackness, poverty, and struggle as perpetually and naturally condemned.
Extending Wynter’s discussion of “1492: A New World View” and the cease-
less geographic workings of colonialism, Ansfield asks that we recognize
the ways in which post-Katrina New Orleans is a location of ongoing po-
liticized struggles that demand a home life: antidemolition struggles, the
right to return, the right to stay, as practices that are deeply entwined with
an ethics of recognizing alternative claims to humanness. Katherine Mc-
Kittrick’s essay, “Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and
the Promise of Science,” explores the ways in which science and scientific
knowledge emerge in the writings of Sylvia Wynter. Looking at the scien-
tific contours of creative labor, the essay concludes with a discussion of Jimi
Hendrix, music making, blackness, and scientific-mathematic knowledge to
illuminate Wynter’s call to envision the human as bios-mythois and being
human as praxis. Nandita Sharma’s “Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decoloniz-
ing Decolonization” focuses on the ways in which displaced and migratory
communities—populations who are identifiable as “immigrants” rather
than “indigenous”—are, through the language and theorizing of “settler
colonialism,” produced as colonizing subjects. By dwelling on Wynter’s
discussion of propter nos, Sharma suggests that the inequalities produced
through colonialism not be conceptualized vis-à-vis the Manichaean cate-
gories of “native” and “nonnative” but rather through the planetary interhu-
man consequences of 1492 and the resultant shared experience of, and thus
resistance to, terror.
Rinaldo Walcott’s contribution, “Genres of Human: Multiculturalism,
Cosmo-politics, and the Caribbean Basin,” reads the Caribbean basin in
relation to European modernity. Working with the writings of Sylvia Wyn-
ter, Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Jacques

Yours in the Intellectual Struggle 5

Derrida, among others, Walcott argues the Caribbean region does not of-
fer an easy unified articulation of sameness through difference but rather
a space where the constant negotiation of particularities—extending out-
ward from colonial brutalities—produces an ethics of being “yet to come.”
Carole Boyce Davies’s “From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cul-
tural Resistance and the Rehumanizing Project” invites a complex and
unique reading of Wynter’s dramatic play not only because she unearths
the intellectual provocations found in practices of creativity—her culling of
Wynter’s theoretical-scholarly insights that are embedded in Maskarade is
meaningful—but also because she suggests that such practices of creativity
are, for postslave black / Caribbean communities, ways to imagine and bring
forth integrated and soldered human and environmental alternatives to the
crude mechanics of capitalism that arose from plantation slavery. Indeed,
we can notice in the essays by Boyce Davies and Walcott, if read alongside
Sharma’s contribution, how Wynter’s work draws attention to the ways in
which transatlantic slavery—violent displacement—enforced the neces-
sity of blacks to plant themselves as indigenous to the New World. This kind
of insight importantly troubles the politics of claiming land alongside racial
particularities and takes what is now being called “settler colonialism” in a
different direction.
Demetrius Eudell’s essay, “Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing”: The
Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black / Human,” closes the col-
lection and situates Wynter’s insights within the context of black intellectual
history. Eudell’s essay surveys key themes that emerge in Wynter’s writings
and across black studies, and underscores how particular thinkers have, ei-
ther in part or to a large extent, challenged the overrepresentation of Man.
Eudell’s essay traces the ways in which black subjects negotiate biocentric
racial scripts in relation to their own inventions of blackness. The essay un-
covers the ways in which Wynter’s insights on sociogeny help clarify the
process through which blackness—as we know it—becomes a reality.

Yours in the Intellectual Struggle / The Realization of the Living

Over many, many hours Sylvia Wynter generously shared an analytical story
that was insightful, creative, prodigious, urgent. The analytical story put
forth both in “Conversations” and in her other works is not simply an intel-
lectual treatise; the ideas uncover a synthesizing mind at work. Put differ-
ently, throughout and within her essays and ideas, Wynter does not simply
convey a set of ideas; rather, she demonstrates the difficult labor of thinking

6 Katherine McKittrick
the world anew. Wynter’s ideas are, in a sense, invariably verbs, encoded
with active thought processes grappling with the magma of far-reaching
challenges—including the unresolved / unsolved problem of race—which
has come to confront us as a global human species collectively living with,
through, and against the West’s incorporating expansion. To engage her re-
search and ideas is not, then, to take up a purely discursive text; rather, her
work reveals intellectual life and struggle, with Wynter bringing into focus
the dimensions of human life itself through her intensely provocative intel-
lectual concerns and the correlated practice of cognition: a mind at work /
everything is praxis.
The title of this introduction, “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia
Wynter and the Realization of the Living,” is meant to signal how we might
read the work of Sylvia Wynter and the essays collected here. Many letters
Wynter has posted to me, and others, over the years have closed with the
words “yours in the intellectual struggle” and have inspired a world that
imagines change.6 But the struggle to make change is difficult within our
present system of knowledge; the struggle can, and has, reproduced prac-
tices that profit from marginalization and thus posit that emancipation in-
volves reaching for the referent-we of Man. Thus, “yours in the intellectual
struggle” bears witness to the practice of sharing words and letters while also
drawing attention to the possibilities that storytelling and wording bring.
Sylvia Wynter’s insights, essays, letters, and shared ideas signal that hers
is a generous project, one that allows the authors in this collection and else-
where to draw attention to new stories of being human that challenge the
profitable brutalities that attend the realization of Man-as-human.7 I suggest
that Wynter’s closing signature—“yours in the intellectual struggle”—is
best conceptualized alongside Maturana and Varela’s “the realization of the
living.” The latter’s research on social systems, the biological sciences, and
human activities has long informed Wynter’s work and points to her under-
standing that our present analytic categories—race, class, gender, sexuality,
margins and centers, insides and outsides—tell a partial story, wherein hu-
manness continues to be understood in hierarchical terms. The realization
of the living, then, is a relational act and practice that identifies the contem-
porary underclass as colonized-nonwhite-black-poor-incarcerated-jobless
peoples who are not simply marked by social categories but are instead
identifiably condemned due to their dysselected human status. At the same
time, as noted earlier, “the realization of the living” must be imagined as in-
viting being human as praxis into our purview, which envisions the human as

Yours in the Intellectual Struggle 7

verb, as alterable, as relational, and necessarily dislodges the naturalization
of dysselection.
Wynter and the essayists here do not use categories of disenfranchise-
ment as a starting points; rather, they focus on the ways in which such cate-
gories work themselves out in relation to the human, being human, human
being, and codes that govern humanness. Wynter’s outlook thus identifies
that humanness might be newly conceptualized as a relational category,
what she describes in “Conversations” as bios-mythois, that is differentially
inscribed by a knowledge system that mathematizes the dysselected. This
is to say that human life is marked by a racial economy of knowledge that
conceals—but does not necessarily expunge—relational possibilities and
the New World views of those who construct a reality that is produced
outside, or pushing against, the laws of captivity. It follows, according to
Wynter, that we would do well to reanimate and thus more fully realize the
co-relational poetics-aesthetics of our scientific selves.

Notes
1. Including, it should be noted, the nine-hundred-page unpublished manu-
script, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, which is housed at
the The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York.
2. Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism,” 119–207.
3. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 11; Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” 134–146.
4. Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism,” 206.
5. Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition.
6. Wynter discusses her signature in Thomas, “ProudFlesh Inter / Views Sylvia
Wynter.”
7. Thomas, “ProudFlesh Inter / Views Sylvia Wynter”; Bogues, After Man, to-
wards the Human; Eudell and Allen, “Sylvia Wynter.”

8 Katherine McKittrick