Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis

Katherine McKittrick’s edited volume Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is, as its title makes plain, rooted in the concept of praxis. This is a concept that, for Wynter, involves a vital ethic – vital, as in a matter of life and death. The volume is comprised of a lengthy conversation between Wynter and McKittrick alongside essays by scholars working within a variety of conceptual frames. It is out of this dialogic space that the foundations, provocations, and promise of Wynter’s intellectual/activist project emerge. McKittrick’s interview questions are perfectly attuned to the relational “knot of ideas and histories and narratives” that Wynter’s “anticolonial vision” evokes (2). They invite Wynter to assert the deconstructive nature of her intervention – her effort to get under the skin surface, behind the curtain, and out of the box of our cognition to see the specific mechanisms that generate the “is” of our contemporary world order. Drawing on Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, Wynter interrogates the racist episteme that undergirds the biocentric understanding of our human selves. She exposes the long historically determined mechanisms by which the Darwinian, capitalist, Eurocentric Man has come to stand in for the whole of the human community – a community divided into “naturally” selected (white, male, straight, and rich) and dysselected (nonwhite, female, queer, and poor) beings. We are, she argues, hybrid creatures. Beyond the biological factors that condition our being, we are the stories we tell ourselves. We create ourselves with those stories, but we forget to remember that these stories are constructed and contingent. What then, she asks, is the story that underlies Western domination? What hostile “orders of truth” (32) does it reveal, and how can they be undone? How do we unthink the world as we know it and reach for freedom?