Sylvia Wynter is prolific for weaving together skills from her diverse practices as a playwright, critic, essayist, and philosopher, to generate complex and nuanced ideas on the construction of social identities of “Man” (which has come to be equated with “human”) and its binary otherness (equated with “sub-human”). Wynter’s scholarship has been taken up recently to bolster BlackCrit theory, explore conceptions of emotion and affect, and to critique and attend to the ways in which education performs (re)productive acts of identity (over)construction (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2020; Snaza & Tarc, 2019; Wynter, 2003; Zembylas, 2021). One way the scholarship of Wynter (and those inspired by her work) can be understood is through four major categories: conceptualizations of “Man”, production and reproduction, overrepresentation, as well as affect and emotionality.

Conceptualizations of “Man”

A strong tenet of Wynter’s scholarship is her explicit description of how, through social construction, the definition of “Man” has come to be understood. Wynter sees “Man” as an evolution of the reproduction of characteristics of those who hold oppressive power and is therefore the echelon of what an acceptable human should embody. Man is conceived as a binary to other “non” humans who are unable to embody these specific characteristics. Wynter describes this evolution as one where the power to construct identity has shifted over time from the divine power granted by the church to both the very real and also perceived power of the colonizer and therefore politics (or the state). As described by Wynter (2003) “two different anthropologies and their respective origin models/narratives had inscribed two different descriptive statements of the human, one which underpinned the evangelizing mission of the Church, the other the imperializing mission of the state based on its territorial expansion and conquest” (p. 286).

As we proceed through history, power continues to shift towards that of the economic realm and this has also come to embody new definitions of what is allowed to be considered “Man”. Presently our hierarchy is no longer sheerly based on race (whether it be religious based or biological/politically based, and all the multiracial people that make up the layers of the hierarchy), but also on class. We must inevitably conclude that, “in the wider context of the intellectual revolution of Liberal or economic (rather than civic) political humanism that is being brought in from the end of the eighteenth century onwards by the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie, together with their redefinition of Man1 in the purely secular and now biocentric terms of Man2 that these new sciences are going to be made possible” (Wynter, 2003, p. 322).

The scholarship of Busey and Dowie-Chin (2020) addresses further concern for these identity constructions in the context of citizenship. Humans that have fallen into the category of “sub” or “non” man have been intentionally denied the citizenship aspect of identity. Citizenship is of particular concern for Black folks and therefore has been central to BlackCrit theory which highlights the reality of how Black folks are “othered” in a dehumanizing way to ensure their lack of power, truth, and freedom within the binary systems where Black folks may find themselves (colonized/decolonized, slave/citizen, citizen/anti-citizen). The major criticism her is that there is no means of embodying citizenship within the Black identity as constructed by the oppressors, “the concept of anti-citizenship problematizes appeals to the very political system whose very design rendered Black folk as non-human and anti-citizen in the first place” (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2020, p. 158).

Production and Reproduction

Wynter further problematizes identity construction by spotlighting how all contributing society members, as well as society itself, is complicit in this construction. We perpetuate the rules of the social order we are in by enabling re/production of the criteria of Man and contemporary Western society. Wynter (2003) states that “in order to live in society, we must produce the society in which we live” and we do this unconsciously, allowing us to “repress the recognition of our collective production of our modes of social reality” (p. 273).

A lynch pin of Wynter’s (2003) critique here is her conceptualization of a “truth-for ” which she ties directly to coloniality as “our own disciplines… must still continue to function, as all human orders of knowledge have done from our origin on the continent of Africa until today, as a language-capacitated form of life, to ensure that we continue to know our present order of social reality, and rigorously so, in the adaptive ‘truth-for’ terms needed to conserve our present descriptive statement” (p. 270). These “truths-for” can be seen as socially constructed ways in which we think about categorizing who is or isn’t human, reinforced by centuries of re/production, that have become an “objective set of facts” (p. 271). As reinforced by Wynter (2003), “these truths had therefore both commanded obedience and necessitated the individual and collective behaviours by means of which each such order and its mode of being human were brought into existence, produced, and stably reproduced” (p. 271).

Wynter (2003) additionally highlights how our “truths-for” are enabled within ourselves as the authors and agents of our own orders and we therefore lack the perspective to see our own implications in creating these mechanisms because they’ve always been reproduced in different ways. The shift from Man1 to Man2 is produced and reproduced in the same Grand Narrative, thus even with the shift, the social order is still being continually produced and reproduced without the necessary full systemic change.

Overrepresentation

An understanding of Wynter’s (2003) definition of “man” combined with her conceptions of re/production drive us to the conclusion that “man” has come to be overrepresented. According to Wynter (2003), man “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves” (p. 260). Due to this constant production/reproduction of the current truth-for of what Man is (aka Man2), Man is being overrepresented as human, even though they are very different realities. Man acts as a prescriptive perspective of humanity held by those in power, but this is not actually reflective of our unique human experiences. This is problematic on many (perhaps every) level, and in sum, overrepresentation leads to the absolute “coloniality of being, power, truth, freedom” (Wynter, 2003, p. 327).

Busey and Dowie-Chin (2021) provide glimmers of hope, as their BlackCrit theorization can provide tools to start the slow process of tempering this phenomenon, “looking towards BlackCrit to create space for resisting the overrepresentation of what man is and the production/reproduction of the dangerous stories that the overrepresentation produces” (p. 162).

Affect and Emotionality

Additional current Wynter scholarship is occurring in the field of affect theory, notably by Zembylas (2021). Affect Theory “is an approach to history, politics, culture, and all other aspects of embodied life that emphasizes the role of nonlinguistic and non-or para-cognitive forces” (Schaefer, 2019, as cited in Zembylas, 2021, p.5). Although Wynter did not directly comment on Affect theory, her studies on overrepresentation of “Man” mixed with emotional recognition of “non-man” humans (and the lack of that emotional recognition) has led scholars to make connections between her works and Affect theory. However there is some reflection necessary on the nuances of how emotion is specifically tied to affect and or whether they are in fact entangled at all. There tends to be two varying perspectives on this, in Camp 1 we see “see affect and emotion as structurally distinct” which is rationalized by perceiving affect as “autonomous, precognitive, prelinguistic, asocial” (Zembylas, 2021, p. 5). Zembylas (2021) explains that “emotion as the conventional manifestation of affect through language, reason and consciousness” (p. 5). Lastly, for affect to manifest in this way, we require an assumption of a “universal humanist subject and body” (Zembylas, 2021, p.5).

Zembylas’ (2021) article brings to light how this perspective creates potentially problematic assumptions, “some [but-not-all] Western affect theorists claim that there is a universality in our affects, whereas in reality affects are always locally, historically and culturally specific…. [these] fail to recognize the particularities of subordinated/colonized peoples’ affective experiences” (p. 5). Therefore an alternative perspective offered up “see[s] affect and emotion as essentially interchangeable” (Zembylas, 2021, p. 5). When observing daily life, “affect and emotion are not separate but rather intertwined” and seem to exist “on a continuum rather than rigid camps” (Zembylas, 2021, p. 5).

Wynter (2003) tends to argue that within affect there exists implicit bias due to coloniality, and the notion of overrepresentation of man needs to be taken up alongside affect theory in order to provide meaningful context: “Wynter rejects the notion of universally intelligible human affects because the rubric for measuring these is not neutral but, rather, operative within histories of racism, ableism, misogyny, and other fears of bodily difference” (Palmer, 2017, as cited in Zembylas, 2021, p. 7).

Within the social construction of the identity of “man” we need to account for how emotionality is framed and accepted (or not accepted). Zembylas (2021) explains this disconnect, “ ‘being’, ‘power’, ‘truth’, and ‘freedom’ are not the only thing applied to ‘Man’ but also emotional expression and validation of that expression. Any expression outside of framing of ‘Man’ are routinely ignored or even do not register” (p. 2).

Hyper Visualization of emotionality, especially of “Man” has the ability to discount and even reject those that are seen as “non” man humans as though their emotional responses to affect are not seen as rational or justified. “Intelligibility of one’s feelings towards others, particularly the capacity to sense the pain of others, is framed by histories of colonial violence and refusals of imaginative identification” (Zembylas, 2021, p. 2). For example, during the Black Lives Matter Protests on some right-winged media sources (such as Fox News) the message was “comply” with laws and institutions, implying that compliance is what is necessary for safety and security, discounting the emotionality of the situation as uncalled for, and even exaggerated. When there is a recognition of inequality and injustice “knowledge systems position racism generally and anti blackness specifically, as a glitch” (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2020, p. 156). Racism is sanitized or reduced to “bad actors” and comparisons made to other nations/nation-states that we aren’t “as bad as…”, and therefore we are “morally superior” (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2020).

To conclude, as stated succinctly by Busey and Dowie-Chin state: “the United States becomes a “natural peacemaker” (DuBois, 1920, p. 28) and noble intervener in genocidal projects; the adoption of mestizaje and racial democracy ideologies in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba vindicates Latin American countries from U.S.-style racism (Hooker, 2017); and multiculturalism masked in the lack of a de jure Jim Crow system in Canada makes the country morally superior to the United States (Walcott, 1999, 2000)” (2020, p. 156).

References

Busey, C. L., & Dowie-Chin, T. (2021). The making of global Black anti-citizen/citizenship: Situating BlackCrit in global citizenship research and theory. Theory & Research in Social Education, 49(2), 153-175. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2020.1869632

Snaza, N., & Tarc, A. M. (2019). “To wake up our minds”: The re-enchantment of praxis in Sylvia Wynter. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 1-9. http://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1552418

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

Zembylas, M. (2021). Sylvia Wynter, racialized affects, and minor feelings: Unsettling the coloniality of the affects in curriculum and pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum Studies. Advanced Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2021.1946718

Suggested Readings for Further Study

Baszille Denise T. (2019). Rewriting/recurricularizing as a matter of life and death: The coloniality of academic writing and the challenge of Black mattering therein. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 7-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1546100

Dixon,-Román, E. (2017). Toward a hauntology on date: On the sociopolitical forces of data assemblages. Research in Education, 98(1), 44-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034523717723387

Knight, H. (2019). Imagining institutions of Man: Constructions of the human in the foundations of Ontario public schooling curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 90-109. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1552071

Kromidas, M. (2019). Toward the human, after the child of Man: Seeing the child differently in teacher education. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 65-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549924

Limes-Taylor Henderson, K. (2019). “I had never been at home in the world”: A case for Black-Indigenism. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 44-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1556562

Rose, E. (2019). Neocolonial mind snatching: Sylvia Wynter and the curriculum of Man. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 25-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1554950

Snaza, N. (2019). Curriculum against the state: Sylvia Wynter, the human, and futures of curriculum studies. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 129-148. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1546540

Truman, S. E. (2019). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110-128. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465

Zaino, K. (2021). Liberal humanism, social science, and the discursive legacy of the “human” in English education. Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education, 6(1), n.p. https://traue.commons.gc.cuny.edu/liberal-humanism-social-science-and-the-discursive-legacy-of-the-human-in-english-education/