Instructor: Paige Sweet Across a stunning oeuvre that includes fiction, drama, theory, and criticism, the Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter attempts nothing less than a whole-scale rethinking of the human. For Wynter, the notion of “Man” that has developed since the enlightenment is everywhere and yet exclusive. It projects a narrow Western middle and upper class ideal, fundamentally racist, violent, and constitutive of global exploitation. Drawing on work by Franz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire, Wynter prods us, in Katherine McKittrick’s words, to consider “the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.” For Wynter, this means decolonizing cultural, literary, and political histories of the Caribbean, as well as a promiscuous combination of science studies, migratory politics, Black studies, and myth-making to generate a new understanding of the human as part of political practice. How, for Wynter, did the Western European become “the figure of man”? And what might it mean to “decolonize” being, power, truth, freedom, and the human?