Neocolonial mind snatching: Sylvia wynter and the curriculum of Man

Abstract

In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in Caribbean, European, African, and American societies. In addition, her work demonstrates how education globally structures a particular cultural, historical, and onto-epistemic anti-Black/anti-Indigenous worldview. In Wynter’s most neglected piece of work ‘Do Not Call Us Negros’ How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism she weaponizes the second and third wave of her work¹ to unpack and provide a fresh critique to the Black English debates that occurred in California in the 1990s. In this, she reframes debates about history curriculum and culture from a white conservative nativist one of Man (the status quo) to the alternative Black Studies Alterity Perspective rooted in the liminal Black socio-historical-cultural experiences. Continuing Wynter’s layered excavation of education as the site of EuroAmerican cultural reproduction, I sketch out a different philosophical discourse to those grounded in capital and/or race debates of the social sciences; I present a philosophical European coming of age story of humanism as a distant stage in how the West became self-aware and created a consciousness of itself. In doing so, this Western European humanism, or what Wynter coins Man for short, embarked on a 500-year journey of colonialism/coloniality to plunder the gifts and talents of the minds and bodies of non-middle-class, non-European populations through a process/technique of what I coin Neocolonial Mind Snatching.

Keywords:

• Sylvia Wynter
• coloniality
• Black Studies
• educational theory
• curriculum studies
• epistemology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Anthony Bogues in his preface to After Man Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter argues that Wynter’s interventions on the nature of Caribbean culture, creative writing, “folk culture” and its profound meaning for the symbolic universe of Caribbean reality, and her present genealogical critique of Western humanism 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 and 1972. These essays include “Novel and History: Plot and Plantation” and “One Love: Rhetoric or reality – Aspects of Afro- Jamaica.” These essays wrestled to decipher the past and fashion a future in a language which was distinctively Caribbean (Bogues, 2006). In this phase, she functioned as a public intellectual, publishing her first major novel Hills of Hebron, and wrote Jamaican stage plays. The second period of her work is centered in the US in the field of Black Studies. Here Wynter brought her considerable talents to bear on the question of race and modernity in the West (Bogues, 2006). This period was also marked by her essay on Caribbean women writers, and her path breaking “1492: A New Worldview.’” Bogues argues this essay was significant because it made clear that Wynter was exploring new ground, “that of Western humanism and the nature of man” (Bogues, 2006, p. xv). In this project, she expanded the ground previously cleared in the 1950s and early 1960s by two extraordinary world figures who emerged from the Caribbean intellectual tradition–Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon (Bogues, 2006). In her present and third stage, Wynter is “confronting the entire intellectual architecture of the West, arguing in a genealogical fashion about the nature of the concept of Man” (Bogues, 2006, p. xv). “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and ReImprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project” and her extremely lengthy “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument” are extraordinarily rich pieces in this phase.

2 There are different forms of coloniality. Although the specific colonial power operations are beyond the scope of this paper, there can be a coloniality of knowledge, coloniality of being, and coloniality of power. All of these various forms of coloniality, developed by coloniality/colonialism/modernity theorists, seeks to preserve and continue the different historically produced versions of Man’s overrepresentation over their racialized epistemic-ontogenetic notions of the human (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2007, 2011; Quijano, 2010; Wynter, 1995, 2003).

3 …cultural-specific knowledge that belongs to the original peoples of Africa that is based on their philosophies. The knowledge incorporates their social and natural well-being, their cosmos, and their spiritual world. It is a science that should be alive in contemporary African schools because it is a living science that mirrors the people’s lived experience (p. 15).

4 This heading is used in Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter’s chapter “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species” in McKittrick’s edited collection Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press: Durham, 2015).