Event

This event provides a schematic introduction to the thought of Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican theorist whose work has become enormously influential in contemporary theories of race, colonialism, and posthumanism. The talk will focus on three broad areas to introduce Wynter's scholarship: First, Wynter’s distinction between the human—an open-ended, hybrid natural/cultural entity—and Man, the /imperialist “genre” of the human that structures the world after 1492. Second, Wynter’s use of cybernetic theory to rethink global politics and subject formation. Both a critique and extension of the work of Michel Foucault, and a revision of Frantz Fanon’s ideas that moves from psychoanalysis to cybernetics, Wynter’s project foregrounds a theory of “sociogeny”—or what she calls (in 1984) “ceremony.” Finally, Wynter’s project will be put in conversation with some contemporary currents in Religious Studies, especially around Black and decolonial spirituality.

Nathan Snaza is the Director of the Humanities Center and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (2024) and Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (2019) and the co-editor of “Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and the Future of Curriculum Studies,” a 2019 issue of Curriculum Inquiry.