“To wake up our minds”: The re-enchantment of praxis in Sylvia Wynter

As a young child, I remember walking to school along Spanish Town Road to a school called Ebenezer School … So we went to this Ebenezer Elementary School. Our school had an excellent schoolmaster. He actually had books. There were not many books, but he had them on some shelves. So we were able to read. …To wake up our minds, he said.! (Wynter in David Scott, 2000, p. 123).

Sylvia Wynter’s sustained and committed study of ideas, systems, peoples and worlds broken by epistemological colonialism(s) compels us to bring forward her educational thought for this Special Issue of Curriculum Inquiry. A Caribbean novelist, playwright and scholar born of Jamaican parents, Wynter became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University in 1977. Across six decades, Wynter’s work generates a discordant symphony of (post)humanist thought that enlivens and “wakes up” our thinking of what it means and has meant to be human beyond the genre of white, European, heteronormative “Man”. Man, Wynter (2003) claims, “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves” (p. 260). For Wynter (2003), the catastrophic present state of the world is wrought by logics being circulated by colonial educational projects that presume this overrepresentation:

All our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources […] these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. (pp. 260–261)

Wynter’s genealogical parsing of the Western episteme, as Foucault has named it, is curricular. Wynter is not interested in engaging knowledge in and of itself but foregrounds the way that it runs the course of our lives. For Wynter, the human as verb is curricular at both an individual and a collective level. Curriculum, as the study, design and enactment of world knowledge, regulates, organizes and sets the course of something called human beings. Taken in both the micro- and macro-sense, curriculum as running the course of the world holds immense implications for how we take up knowledge from here on in – not as a dead, established and revered text, not as a set of facts, a subject area to be studied, but as onto-epistemological, what Wynter, following Fanon (1967), calls sociogeny: the social and narrative production of ideas of what it is to be and to be like a human (Wynter, 2001). Knowledge then does not only provide the content of our lives, but the procedures, fora and terms of reference by which Man verifies, justifies and pronounces some existences as superior, desirable and human and relegates others to the status of “not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 8).

After Wynter, curriculum can be reviewed as what Spivak (1992) terms “pharmakon”, both a medicine and poison, both a humanizing and dehumanizing force. It is here and with this autopoietic and inter-relational turn that Wynter situates the praxis of human being, and with it, our human trouble for what counts as knowledge, as truth, as justice and as living together on the planet.

In our initial call for papers, we asked how curriculum studies can benefit from sustained engagement with Sylvia Wynter’s interdisciplinary, decolonial thought. We looked to Wynter’s scholarship as marking a crucial point of departure for concatenating two currents of debate permeating curriculum theory today. The first is articulated in challenges to the whiteness of the field, especially in terms of its institutional structures, conceptual genealogies and bibliographical narrowness (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). The second interrogates fixed ontological conceptions of “the human” as it functions as a normative and unquestioned category of existence anchoring educational philosophy and theory in the global North (see the essays in Curriculum Inquiry 45(3) from 2015, “Thinking Beyond the Human”). While the terrain of curriculum today is marked by its own dehumanizing histories and institutional exclusions, curriculum inquiry also provides the autopoietic orientations by which we can narrate our complex relations to each other anew.

In light of these recent debates, then, Wynter offers another reconceptualization of curriculum, one that sees autobiographical, autopoietic modes of study immersed in a deep and rigorous unravelling of Eurocentric, humanist and consumptive forms of knowledge that continue to form and deform our lives, lived realities and the planet. Wynter (2001) embarks upon study out of necessity, the urgency of our times and finds reason to affirm the evolutionary (and/or progressive) possibilities that re-searching affords to the becoming of our lives through what she calls the sociogenic principle. If we have been sociogenically articulated as subjects in relation to Man – some of us “human”, many of us less-than-human – then other sociogenic becomings are always possible.

Study, as Harney and Moten (2013) insist, is not invented by the intelligentsia, but is the key survival mechanism of those in the undercommons, the Indigenous, the racialized, the sexually maligned, the diagnostically disabled, those who refuse categorical existence and are exiled from social belonging. Study is, for Wynter then, profoundly serious, about learning to live in a system of classification that systematically dismembers human beings so that we might chart new terms of our own making. Wynter’s interrogation of knowledge, of the curriculum of man that garners Western lives, begins in what Scott (2000) has called, following Fanon, “the anti-colonial assault”.

Reading Wynter can be a bit of a trip, literally, through the entire history of Western humanism. Her method of explication is dazzling as she moves through genealogies of what it means to be human. From the violating genre of Man, Wynter reads and unpacks the regulatory meta-texts of “Man” at the centre of all social and political life, and a new vocabulary of being springs up. Attentive study of our kin and kind, Wynter demonstrates, can liberate us from categorical binds enslaving us to normative being, one that aesthetically and epistemologically misleads each of us from birth from the ongoing, relational, intersubjective, utterly dependent praxis of having to be, for better and much worse, human.

Wynter’s study of categorical existence is an ongoing praxis of human being and not an academic exercise. In Los Angeles of 1994, in the days following the acquittal of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King, Wynter (1994) learned of the radically dehumanizing label of NHI, or No Humans Involved. Police officers used this term to identify King and routinely used it to designate the non-human status of black men, prostitutes and drug-dealers (p. 42). Upon this discovery, Wynter took her study of human life to the streets. She wrote an open letter to her colleagues about the “systems of classification held by the officers […] in the routine breaking of Black males” (p. 43). In the letter’s wide circulation, Wynter (1994) embarks on a public pedagogy attempting to understand the legal and curricular framework that routinely takes down the lives of black men and others subjected to state-sanctioned violence. Given the ongoing assault against Indigenous sovereignty, people of colour, women, the poor, GLBTQIA* persons, the neurodiverse and others who perform non-Man ways of being human, her account could not be more apropos.

We include articles in this issue from scholars who engage in the study of histories, texts, experiences and new social movements to generate new vocabularies and practices of being human. Wynter has not always been read as a curriculum scholar, but these articles all find in her scholarship a mode of attending to politics, lived experience and knowledge that is deeply invested in the questions that animate the field. The first two articles, by Denise Taliaferro Baszile and Ebony Rose, both locate Wynter’s work within Black Studies, charting the ways that her genealogical and ontological account of the anti-blackness of modernity structures present possibilities for being, thinking, teaching and creating new worlds. Baszile’s autobiographically inflected text, titled “ReWriting/Recurricularizing as a Matter of Life and Death: The Coloniality of Academic Writing and the Challenge of Black Mattering Therein” begins with contemporary Black Lives Matter activism, turning to Wynter to diagnose the ways that anti-blackness shapes the genres of academic (and other) writing. She then sketches an alternative history – Wynter (1984) might say a “new ceremony” – that propels other sociogenic projects, or what she calls “a new sound/logic coming forth” from within the black radical aesthetic tradition. Rose’s essay, titled “Neocolonial Mind Snatching: Sylvia Wynter and the Curriculum of Man” takes up similar concerns, but summons a more sweeping overview of what Wynter calls “the coloniality of being”. Through this overview, Rose theorizes what he calls “neocolonial mind snatching” in order to grapple with the ways that anti-blackness and anti-Indigeneity shape the episteme in which curricular projects emerge. The article ends with a call for us to “carve out a new direction” in our work as curriculum scholars and teachers committed to the flourishing of non-Man, decolonial genres of performing the human (p. 40).

In the third article, titled “‘I Had Never Been at Home in the Word’: A Case for Black-Indigenism” Kelly Limes-Taylor Henderson’s picks up on the suggestions in Rose’s article that link anti-black and anti-Indigenous politics of Man, using an autobiographically driven form to propose “Black-Indigenism” as a concept to short circuit Man’s policing of rigid boundaries among narratively deselected groups, thus offering a crucial mode of affiliated struggle based on a careful reading of colonial history. Without flattening settler colonialism and the colonialist production of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (and its ongoing permutations of the social), Limes-Taylor Henderson calls for a mode of thinking that “equally attends to the struggles of Disaporic Blacks…and the struggles of global Indigenous peoples… in an effort to resist and heal from the effects of centuries of Western colonialist dominance” (p. 58).

The following two articles, by Maria Kromidas and Hunter Knight, constellate Wynter’s Man/human distinction with work in the field of childhood studies, tracing the ways that “the child” functions as a synecdoche for Man that courses through educational projects and institutions. In “Towards the Human, After the Child of Man: Seeing the Child Differently in Teacher Education”, Kromidas analyzes work in developmental psychology, especially textbooks that are taught in education programs training teachers, to detail how Man as the only allowable telos of development becomes written into supposedly “neutral” or universal theories of learning, teaching and human growth. On her reading, Wynter’s scholarship offers a way to see how racism (and other modes of dehumanization) flourish in the colour-blind and ableist language of psychological theory and developmentalism, which continues to be required reading in most teacher education programs. Knight’s article, titled “Imagining Institutions of Man: Constructions of the Human in the Foundations of Ontario Public Schooling Curriculum” asks similar questions, but looks backwards to the founding of the Ontario public schools, tracking how Egerton Ryerson’s proposals for constructing the first state-sponsored mass public education system in Upper Canada were structured by colonial conceptions of the child and a fervent commitment to settler colonialism.

The last two articles, by Sarah E. Truman and Nathan Snaza, turn to specific contexts of study and learning to link Wynter’s project with both literacy practices and concern with nonhumans. In “Inhuman Literacies and Affective Refusals: Sylvia Wynter and Secondary School English” Truman collates Wynter’s critique of Man with work in affect theory, queer studies, new materialisms and decolonial thought to explore how ninth grade English classes perform the sociogenic work of humanizing and dehumanizing at the level of affect: pre-personal and pre-linguistic forms of communication across entities, only some of which are human. What emerges from such a project is a focus on how “small” moments of connection, refusal, speaking, writing and becoming-together “have the potential to speculatively rewrite homo narrans’ storying toward a transformation of humanism from within” (p. 124). Snaza’s article, titled “Curriculum Against the State: Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and Futures of Curriculum Studies” closes the issue by exploring the ways that the syllabus projects emerging in relation to racialized state violence – especially the #FergusonSyllabus and #StandingRockSyllabus – can be constellated to imagine a future for curriculum studies that is detached from and disinterested in Man and its production in (settler) colonialist public schools. Against Man, Snaza proposes “curricula against the state” that would both critically interrogate the colonialist dehumanizations that structure everyday life in North America, and experimentally enact alternative ways of becoming human together.

Perhaps this Special Issue engaging Sylvia Wynter’s remarkable ouvre comes late. At 90 years old, her school, King’s College in London, UK, of which Wynter is alumnus, is also late to finally honor Wynter, calling her “one of the most influential and important thinkers and public intellectuals of our time” (“For the reckord”, 2018). But it also seems fitting that in the late thought of Wynter, in the late time of human civilization, scholars are looking back at her work to move forward in the “wake up” time in which education and its institutions, but also the undercommons that surround them, need her compelling thought the most. Following Wynter’s infinite hopefulness, the contributors’ re-finding of Wynter’s thought comes just in time to help the field of curriculum studies deepen its questioning of the human in ways that connect that problematic to the exigencies of decolonial praxis, ecological struggle, and the urgent need to dismantle state structures that inflict violence upon those whose humanity is suspect because of their race, gender, sexuality, size and abilities.

We hope that this issue will re-enchant curriculum praxis, invigorate readers and remind scholars, educators, teachers, students and activists of our enduring commitment to setting study to work in the world: to recounting, reimagining, regenerating what knowledge has meant and can mean for the whole of our lives, towards creating and finding new ceremonies of the land, the world, the planet we share. The lifelong curricular praxis of invention, creation and celebrating significance we hold for each other that Wynter began is awakened in this moment of great upheaval in human thought and relation. Let us not continue to condemn each other to a destructive present wrought by dehumanizing narratives that threaten to literally destroy life on this planet. If not in the university then, as Sylvia Wynter radically teaches, we might find the ceremony with each other in un/common sites of learning, in libraries, in communities, in the streets, in living rooms, in each other’s arms. Only in attuned study of and acting in the world(s) between us can we abolish the forms of life that are killing us to embark on a renewed curricular praxis of generating knowledge that carries and sustains all of our lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.