Sylvia Wynter

Sylvia Wynter was born in 1928, to Percival Wynter and Lola Maude, née Reed, in Cuba. At age two she returned to Jamaica with her parents (both born in Jamaica) and was educated at the St. Andrew High School for Girls. In 1946 she was awarded the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which took her to King's College, University of London, to read for the B.A. honors in modern languages (Spanish) from 1947 to 1949.

Sylvia Wynter was awarded the M.A. in December 1953 for her thesis edition of a Spanish comedia, "A lo que obliga el honor."

In 1958 Wynter met the Guyanese novelist, Jan Carew (who became her second husband). With Carew, she wrote pieces for the BBC and completed "Under the Sun," a full-length play for stage which was bought by the Royal Court Theater.

In 1962 Sylvia Wynter published The Hills of Hebron.

After separating from Carew in the early 1960s, Wynter returned to academics. In 1963, Wynter was appointed assistant lecturer in Hispanic literature at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies—she remained there until 1974. During this time the Jamaican government asked her to write Ballad for a Rebellion, and a biography of Sir Alexander Bustamante, the first prime minister of an independent Jamaica.

Sylvia Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of California 
at San Diego to be a visiting professor for 1974-75. She then became chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University in 1977. She is now Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.

In the mid-to-late 1960s Wynter began writing critical articles which attended to her interests in Caribbean, Latin American, and Spanish history and literatures. In 1968 and 1969 she had published the oft cited "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism." From the 1960s to the present, Wynter has written numerous articles that work to rethink the fullness of human ontologies, which have been curtailed by what she describes as an overrepresentation of Man (Western bourgeois) as if it/he were the only available mode of complete humanness. A skilled and rigorous interdisciplinary scholar, Wynter accentuates how multiple knowledge sources, texts, might differently frame our worldview. The range of her textual sources–she engages and interweaves, for example, physics, film, hip hop, economics, history, neurobiology, critical theory, literature, Christianity–and the depth with which she reads these texts, demonstrate her vast knowledge and her commitment to exploring social justice in new ways.

Works

Novel
* "The Hills of Hebron" (1962)Drama
* "Shh... It's a Wedding" (1961)
* "Miracle in Lime Lane" (1962)
* "1865 Ballad for a Revolution" (1965)
* "Maskarade" (1979)Essays/criticism

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘1492: A New World View.’ Vera Lawrence and Rex Nettleford, eds. Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995: 5-57.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘A Different Kind of Creature’: Caribbean Literature, the Cyclops Factor and the Second Poetics of the Propter Nos’ Annals of Scholarship, 12:1/2, (2001): 153-172.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘After Word: High Life for Caliban.’ Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Africa, The West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text After Man’ June Givanni, ed. Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, (London: British Film Institute, 2000): 25-76.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘A Utopia from the Semi-Periphery: Spain, Modernization, and the Enlightenment.’ Science Fiction Studies, 6, (1979): 100-107.

Wynter, Sylvia. Beyond Liberal and Marxist Leninist Feminisms: Towards and Autonomous Frame of Reference. San Francisco: Institute for Research on Women and Gender, 1982.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Women.’ Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990: 355-372.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis’ Paget Henry, Paul Buhle eds. C.L.R. James’s Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992: pp?

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles.’ World Literature Today, 63, (Autumn 1989): 637-647.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Breaking the Epistemological Contract on Black America’ Forum NHI, 2:1, (1995): 41-57 and 64-70.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘But What Does Wonder Do? Meanings, Canons, Too?: On Literary Texts, Cultural Contexts, and What It’s Like to Be One/Not One of Us.’ Stanford Humanities Review, 4:1, (Spring 1994): 124-129.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Colombus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos’ Annals of Scholarship, 8:2, (Spring 1991): 251-286.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘‘Colombus, The Ocean Blue and ‘Fables that Stir the Mind’: To Reinvent the Study of Letters’ Bainard Cohen and Jefferson Humphries, eds. Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding and Textuality. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992: 141-164.

Wynter, Sylvia. Do Not Call Us Negroes: How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism. San Francisco: Aspire, 1990.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Ethno or Socio Poetics.’ Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics, 2, (1976): 78-94.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Is Development a Purely Empirical Concept, or also Teleological?: A Perspective from ‘We the Underdeveloped’ Aguibou Y. Yansané, ed. Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa. Westport, Connecticut, 1996: 299-316.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Part One’ Jamaica Journal, 17:2, (May 1984), 25-32.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Part Two’ Jamaica Journal, 17:3, (August-October 1984), 46-55.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘‘No Humans Involved’: An open letter to my colleagues’ Voices of the African Diaspora, 8:2, (Fall 1992): 13-16.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’ Savacou, 5, (1971): 95-102.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond.’ Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, eds. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990: 432-469.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘One-Love Rhetoric or Reality?—Aspects of Afro-Jamaicainism’ Caribbean Studies, 12:3: 90-97.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Rethinking Aesthetics.’ Mbye Cham, ed. Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1992: 238-279.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism’ Boundary II, 12:3 & 13:1, (Spring/Fall 1984): 19-70.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘The Eye of the Other.’ Miriam DeCosta, ed. Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays. New York and London: Kennikat Press, 1977: 8-19.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘The Final Solution to the ‘Nigger Question’: Droppin’ Some Science on the Bell Curve’ Forum NHI, 2:1, (1995): 4-40 and 64-70.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘The Pope Must Be Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality and the Caribbean Rethinking of Modernity’ Alvina Ruprecht and Cecilia Taiana eds. Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the ‘Hood. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995: 17-41.

Wynter, Sylvia and David Scott. ‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.’ Small Axe, 8, (September 2000): 119-207.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience.’ Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, eds. National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2001: 30-66. Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.’ CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:3, (Fall 2003): 257-337.

Wynter, Sylvia. ‘What It’s Like to Be Black.’ Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana eds. National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2001: 30-66.

ources

* "Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature"
*Wynter, Sylvia and David Scott. ‘The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.’ Small Axe, 8, (September 2000): 119-207.

Further reading

* Anthony Bogues, Ed., "After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter" (2006)
* E. K. Brathwaite 'The Love Axe/1; Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic', "BIM", 16 July 1977
* Daryl Cumberdance (ed. 1986) "Fifty Caribbean Writers: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook."
*Katherine McKittrick, "Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle" (2006)