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SoSe 20: Sylvia Wynter: The Coloniality of Being

Henrike Elisabeth Kohpeiß und Jan Slaby

Information for students

Update April 2020: The course will proceed in an online format mixed with elements of self-study. We will create several smaller study groups to enable focused discussion and teamwork. There will be the option to write graded essays throughout the term to obtain the credits, with personal feedback. All information on the course procedures and all required readings will be made available on Blackboard. To prepare, you can read Wynter’s The ceremony must be found, a pdf is available at https://www.semanticscholar.org/. close

Comments

The seminar is devoted to a close engagement with the work of the Jamaican writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, a key voice in postcolonial scholarship and Black Studies. In particular, we will consider Wynter’s genealogical critique of Western humanism as predicated upon the overrepresentation of man as the only candidate to occupy the status of fully human. Thereby, Wynter’s work delineates the inception and maintenance of colonial modernity from the 14th century to the present. She proposes a deconstructive approach to historically produced genres of the human and opens up a perspective on alternative ways of being human not shaped by the forces of colonialism. The seminar begins with a close reading of Wynter’s 2003 article Unsettling the Coloniality of Being: Power/Truth/Freedom. Subsequently, we will read earlier texts by Wynter and some of her key source texts. We will especially consider her work on Frantz Fanon’s conception of sociogenesis and her unconventional attempts to draw on the cognitive sciences and on naturalistic philosophy of mind. Towards the end of the term, we will discuss newer texts from Black Studies that build upon Wynter’s work or attempt to develop it further. close