Sylvia Wynter Sylvia Wynter ON BEING HUMAN AS PRAXIS 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 / I nsight Grant) which provided funds toward the publication of this book. For Ellison CONTENTS ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 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 CHAPTER 10 “Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing”: The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black / Human 249 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 CONTRIBUTORS 277 INDEX viii Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 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-p lace reverberations of the events noted and unspoken and yet- to-c ome—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.