Sylvia Wynter Quotes
Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican philosopher, dramatist, and professor emerita at Stanford University, whose work has reshaped contemporary thinking on humanism, race, and the very category of the human. Her landmark essay Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom argued that what we call the human is in fact one historically specific genre, the figure of Man, that has overrepresented itself as the species, while the experience of Black, indigenous, and colonized peoples discloses the limits of that figure. The quotes below are attributed to Sylvia Wynter, organized by topic.
Sylvia Wynter on Death
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“In the square not even the ghost of a wind stirred the naked trees. Aware of the creeping death around them, the children no longer played by the spring. They remained at home, lingering by their mothers or sitting on the doorstep beside their fathers. And they wondered at the silences which had sprung up between their parents, between neighbour and neighbour. (6: The Star-Apple Tree )”
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Sylvia Wynter on God
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“As he returned to the congregation he sought for words to share with them the long journey that he had taken. He sought for words to tell them of the world that he had entered where there were no far places and no strangers: only men, like themselves, who would one day inhabit together the same new continents of the spirit, the same planets of the imagination. (21: The Journey)”
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Sylvia Wynter on Justice
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“Public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely use the acronym ‘N.H.I.’ to refer to any case that involved a breach of the rights of young Black males who belonged to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos. N.H.I. means ‘no humans involved.”
No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Knowledge on Trial 1 (1994)
Sylvia Wynter on Knowledge
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“No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Knowledge on Trial 1 (1994)”
Public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely use the acronym ‘N.H.I.’ to refer to any case that involved a breach of the rights of young Black males who belonged to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos. N.H.I. means ‘no humans involved. -
“In the silence that followed, the bubble of the morning's celebrations was shattered and the fragments went spinning away like the mist in the morning light. (from 1: The Vow)”
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“The sun reared up over Hebron like a wild horse. It streamed across the sky, tangled with the naked branches of trees, brightened the hills, illuminated winding paths, glittered like incandescent dust on the heads and shoulders, the marching feet of the congregation; rimmed their flags and banners with light, and settled in the gleaming river of morning that flooded the land. (7: The Money-Box)”
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“[He] heard her singing and knew that she had forgotten him already, that in the morning, if she remembered him, it would be with the vagueness of an indistinct dream. And knew that, walking away from her, he was walking away from the land and the people whose reflected image of him had shaped his dreams, fashioned the self that he would now go in search of, to be swept away into the wide indifference of the sea. (19: The Rape)”
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Sylvia Wynter on Mind
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Attributed to Sylvia Wynter:
“Being human is a praxis, not a substance.”
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“Ann sat in the back of the cart, and, as they drove off, she waved to Aunt Kate. The old woman did not wave back. The past had taken over in her mind once more. (7: The Money-Box)”
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Sylvia Wynter on Politics
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Attributed to Sylvia Wynter:
“Man is not the human, but a particular historical genre that has overrepresented itself as the species.”
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Attributed to Sylvia Wynter:
“From the demonic ground we may glimpse a new genre of being human.”
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Attributed to Sylvia Wynter:
“Truth has its colonial geography; freedom must invent another.”
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Attributed to Sylvia Wynter:
“We need a new humanism, born after the wreck of the old.”