Sylvia Wynter Quotes on Politics

Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003) and the long sequence of essays collected in On Being Human as Praxis (2015) give contemporary Caribbean political philosophy one of its most influential statements of the decolonial critique of the Western conception of the human. The central thesis is that the West’s overrepresentation of its own ethno-class genre of the human (Man) as the human as such is the constitutive operation of modern colonial-capitalist domination — and that the corresponding philosophical-political work is the elaboration of a new genre of the human that breaks with the secular-biological-economic conception consolidated through the long history of European modernity from 1492 onward. The framework, drawing on Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, the Caribbean intellectual tradition, and the broader critical engagement with colonial knowledge production, shaped contemporary Black studies, decolonial theory, and the philosophical interpretation of the human.