Decolonisation and Beyond: Three Lectures on Sylvia Wynter

Sylvia Wynter is one of the most captivating voices in black critical thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As the largely unacknowledged counterpart to Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, her writing explores the racialized nature of Western conceptions of the human. For those who are interested in decolonizing knowledge, Wynter’s Caribbean-based and wide-ranging work is a model for radically rewriting humanities studies. Her rethinking of humanism in relation to dehumanization, alongside an insistence on creative resistance and heresy, gives to her thought a resonance that is particularly timely in South Africa today.

For three nights, the opportunity to engage with her work and to tease out its local and global implications will be offered to us at WiSER, the first conversation on her work to be hosted in Africa.

The lectures will be given by Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory and the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown. A curator, intellectual historian and political theorist, his work ranges across many disciplines to address questions of freedom and emancipation within the frame of the radical imagination as exemplified by two forthcoming books, Black Radicalism: Human Freedom or Emancipation and Cesaire, Fanon & Wynter: Radical Anti- Colonial Thought and  the Enunciation of  the Human. 

The lectures will take place from 6:00 to 7:30 pm at WiSER Seminar Room, 6^th Floor Richard Ward Building. Refreshments will be served.

Seats will be assigned on a first come first served basis. In view of the public interest in these lectures, it is essential to RSVP: Charne.Lavery@wits.ac.za

Decolonization and Beyond: Three Lectures on Sylvia Wynter is part of WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought. The WiSER Spring Program in Critical Thought is supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the National Research Foundation (South Africa).