Suchergebnisse

An examination of the emancipation process in the British Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, during the 1830s, and in the USA, particularly South Carolina, during the 1860s. It explores how former slaves, former slaveholders, and their governments understood and discussed slavery and emancipation

This essay illustrates how Sylvia Wynter's "Black Metamorphosis" reconceptualizes the question of labor as it relates to the history of blacks in the Americas and generally to the being of Being Human. It does so by situating Wynter's distinctive intervention within the context of both Marxism and the engagement by black intellectuals of the issues of labor and class. Moving beyond the presuppositions of liberal humanism, Marxism, and Black Cultural Nationalism, Wynter put forth an interpretation of the cultural forms of blacks in the Americas (both as slaves and postslavery subjects) that could provide insight into the formation and stabilization of human cultural orders. "Black Metamorphosis" can therefore be seen as an earlier elaboration of what she later identified as the laws of human auto-institution, the process by which humans performatively enact our governing symbolic codes of life and death. The issue of material provisioning remains an indispensable but only proximate mechanism for a comprehensive explanation of human behaviors, since capitalism, Wynter argues, serves the central function of instituting and verifying our present conception or genre of being human as Homo oeconomicus, Economic Man.

"The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go beyond making an argument against colonialism, but set out to decolonize the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627). Across this varied range of topics, a coherent thread of argument emerges. In the vein of C. L. R. James, the imperative of her work has always been to reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern world, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no longer from the normative European perspective, but rather more inclusively, from the "gaze from below" of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and the ex-slave (i.e. Negro), which is "the ultimate underside of modernity."" -- Peepal Tree Press website (viewed April 21, 2022)