A NEW SCIENCE OF THE WORD: THE GENIUS OF SYLVIA WYNTER
This course explores the decolonial philosophy of Sylvia Wynter, "the greatest mind the Caribbean has ever produced" (CLR James). Wynter unsettles the colonial roots of the Enlightenment concept of Human in the lineage of Caribbean thinkers like the Césaires, Fanon, and Wilson Harris; she embarks on a multidisciplinary project of reimagining cognition, western science, and the development of modernity. She investigates and develops alternative 'genres' of homo sapiens on the grounds of our hybrid bio-narrative existence (homo narrans), which European rationalist materialism has attempted to overwrite. Resisting the "mechanization of the world" to material causes (guns, germs, and steel, we might say), Wynter instead builds on Fanon's notion of sociogeny, which proposes social, spiritual, and immaterial causes that underlie the materialist colonial project at least since the Enlightenment. Rather than a return to idealism, Wynter proposes a Karen Barad-esque materialism which includes the semiotic, catalyzing an interdisciplinary Black Study and performative myth-making to rewrite the Caribbean as central to modernity and its eventual sunset.
Tuesdays, 8-10 PM EST (5-7 PM PST) Online on Zoom 120 minute sessions, 5 weeks February 3rd - March 3rd, 2026 $125 - $375 Tuition Select scholarships and solidarity rate discounts available upon request.
manuel arturo abreu (*1991 Santo Domingo) is a non-disciplinary artist working with what is at hand in a process of magical thinking with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They have recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Konrad Fischer Galerie (Düsseldorf), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), the Portland Art Museum, SIMIAN (Copenhagen), Kunstverein München (Munich), Bergen Kunsthall, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (Berlin), HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark (Graz), Veronica project space (Seattle), and Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna). Since 2015, with co-founder Victoria Anne Reis, abreu has co-facilitated home school, a free pop-up art school and space of sacred duty in the Pacific Northwest that has been in residence at Yale Union (2019) and Oregon Contemporary (2023). They have written three books of poetry– List of Consonants (Bottlecap Press 2015), transtrender (Quimérica 2016), and two versions of a stone castle (home school press 2024)– and one book of critical prose, Incalculable Loss (Institute for New Connotative Action Press 2018).
Image credit: Cover design for Peepal Tree Press' first of two planned anthologies of Wynter's essays
