Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis develops a bi-valent theory of uneven development: the material/economic development of Western capitalism based on the slave as commodity and the cultural development of what she calls “New World blacks.” Wynter argues that the “cultural underside” of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, articulated by the metamorphosis of captured Africans into blacks, manifested in practices including: Jonkonnu/Carnival, blues/jazz/reggae, and slave plots on the plantation. At the time of writing in the early 1970s, Wynter’s intervention sought to correct both orthodox Marxist economic determinism and black nationalist essentialism by suggesting that humans continually improvise the epistemological conditions of their being. In other words, Wynter’s iterative, improvisational genre of “being human as praxis” contends, through black cultural production, with what she would later describe as, “the production and reproduction of our present hegemonic sociogenic code” (Wynter On How We Mistook the Map, 118).

We invite papers that engage theoretically with Wynter’s oeuvre, as well as practically with ongoing projects of “being human as praxis:” resistance, revolt, and revolution that challenge the reproduction of the hegemonic sociogenic code.

- What does “being human as praxis” look like amidst the ongoing epoch of capitalist/ecological/settler-colonial crisis? Or, a reversal: how might we understand ongoing anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-ecological struggles as facets of the “central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle?” (Wynter Unsettling, 260-261)
- What modes of black life and livingness are produced or foreclosed in the wake of everyday and spectacular anti-black violence?
- How might we understand new ontologies as emerging in the encounter between Africans and the New World, and how might these new ontologies bring us forward to a new genre of the human?
- In an epoch of late capitalist atomization characterized by the dominance of the image and the withering of the social, (how) is metamorphosis still possible?
- How might we bring Wynter’s method of cultural analysis to bear with the contemporary moment of neoliberal austerity, ecological crisis, and anti-black violence?

Bibliography:

McKittrick, Katherine, editor. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Duke University Press, 2015.

Wynter, Sylvia. Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in the New World. Institute of the Black World, unpublished.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.

Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre.” Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, Routledge, 2006.

Organizers: Vignesh Ramachandran, Elijah Levine, & Jagravi Dave

Please submit abstracts to Vignesh Ramachandran at vramachandr9@wisc.edu by 15 December 2023.

Modality: In person