We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays 1967-1984

by Sylvia Wynter

The Event of the anti-colonial struggle which began in the case of a then British Jamaica in the late 1930s, cut across the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the raison d’être of the first phase of her important body of work seen in this collection. The imperative of decolonizing the order of discourse that had legitimated the then imperial order (that is, to the colonizer as well to the colonized), gave rise to a theoretically sustained argument manifest here in a set of seminal critical and historical essays. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James’s writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627). Across this varied range of topics, a coherent and consistent thread of argument emerges from Wynter’s oeuvre. In the vein of C. L. R. James, she placed the history of Spanish Jamaica (and therefore the Caribbean) in the context of the founding of the post-1492 European settler colonies in the New World, which remained an indispensable element in the first stage of the institutionalization of the Western world system. Therefore, a central imperative of her initial work has always been to reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern world, but doing so, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no longer from the normative perspective of the settler archipelago, but rather more inclusively, from those of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and that of ex-slave (i.e. Negro) archipelagos; this latter, as what she defines, adapting Enrique Dussel’s terms, as the "gaze from below" perspective of "the ultimate underside of modernity." Strongly influenced by Marx together with Black thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars (seen in the Jonkunnu essay), W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and with an appreciation of the insights brought by the New Studies of the Sixties (including that of Black redemptive co-humanist thought, feminism), Wynter’s work has sought, from its origin, to find a comprehensive explanatory system able to integrate these knowledges, ones born of struggle. This volume makes an important contribution to restoring to view an essential strand in the 500-year emergent thought generated from the slave/ex-slave archipelago of the Caribbean and the Americas—thought important to what our increasingly integrated world-system, the first such in human history.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, History, Philosophy, Feminism, Race, Politics

645 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

About the author

Sylvia Wynter, OJ (born 11 May 1928), is a Jamaican novelist, dramatist critic and essayist.

Sylvia Wynter’s scholarly work is highly poetic, expository and complex. Her work attempts to elucidate the development and maintenance of modernity and the modern man. She interweaves science, astrology and critical race theory to explain how the European man comes to be the epitome of humanity, “Man 2” or “the figure of man.” In “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” Wynter explains that the West uses race to attempt to answer the question of who and what we are—particularly after the enlightenment period that unveils religion as incapable of answering that question.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sylvia Wynter's immense œuvre (over 2,000 pages for her nonfiction, of which ~600 are in this collection, ~750 should be in the next collection “That the Future May Finally Commence”: Essays for Our Ecumenically Human’s Sake, 1984-2015, and ~800 make up Black Metamorphosis, her yet-unpublished manuscript) is intimidating; like the waves at at a beach, you can wait and wait for a respite between crashing breaks before going in, yet at some point, you should just enter and immerse yourself.

These early essays provide great introductions to Wynter's prolific works:

Creole Criticism has astounding insights into literature and the commercial and bourgeois elements that hold its writers back from not just representing the people but creating art and aesthetics that express newly possible worlds. Such insights are furthered in an essay from 1981 on cricket and CLR James (In Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey) written after Wynter's work in the 70s on Black Metamorphosis, leading to an understanding of poesis, which, following Gregory Bateson, she defines as "the aesthetics of being alive". The interpretations of these "aesthetics of being alive", their production in their own right and in the furtherance of or in opposition to capitalism and consumerism are taken up in many of Wynter's later essays, especially their production by the oppressed, colonized, and other people who occupy liminal spaces in their society's given order (see: Rethinking “Aesthetics”: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice (1992); On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre (2006)).

Wynter's essay on de Las Casas is the beginning of a series of essays that feature figures who were central to the epochal and world-order changes that followed the Age of Exploration and dehumanization started by the Portuguese and the Pope in the 1440s and continued through 1492 and after. This provides a good introduction to her later essays on Columbus, Copernicus, and others (Columbus and the Poetics of Propter Nos (1991); The Pope Must Have Been Drunk; and the King of Castile a Madman (1995); 1492: A New World View (1995); Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables that Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters (1997)).

Though all of the essays here contain elements and motifs that recur in later essays, one of the pieces in this collection, previously unpublished, really blew me away.

Her 1977 essay “'We Know Where We Are From': The Politics of Black Culture From Myal to Marley”, provides not just early foundational work for her later work on the Ceremony Found, sociogeny, and the Science of the Word, but it bears the fruit of her long and sustained intellectual struggle that occurred in the pages of her soon-to-be finally published manuscript Black Metamorphosis. In that work she looked at how Black people came into being in the New World, how they were dehumanized, and how they rehumanized themselves in the face of oppression. In Myal to Marley, she uses what she's learned to juxtapose the 'democratic socialist' Michael Manley and the letdown of the Postcolonial World Order (see Nandita Sharma's Home Rule) and the liberatory possibilities articulated by Black resistance, culture, and beliefs. She also shows how Black culture and history come from a space inside and outside the logics of the modern world orders from which were born:

•The modern capitalist world system, which began with the plantation and its pieza framework of commoditized slaves, alienated workers, and capitalist relations that order our lives and deaths
•Jazz and reggae music that provide alternative systems of music and culture, and modes of poesis, "aesthetics of living" (see In Quest of Matthew Bondsman)
•Rastafarianism, whose beliefs have the potential to see clearly the oppression of Black people and all other oppressed/"downpressed" people, which can be "overturned" by the clear understanding it offers.

The analysis and elaboration in this essay on Rastafarianism was really eye opening, and the following quotes present points in the essay that are key in recognizing all of our shared oppression/"downpression" and how we can move beyond the Color Line that segregates and towards liberation together.

“The semantic field related to the Congolese social order made a distinction between a black slave (for the Portuguese, negro/negra) and being biologically black (prieto/prieta, in also Portuguese terminology). In their social order, a slave had a social status and a clearly defined role. He was not conceptualized as labour power for a mode of production, because as Baudrillard also points out, the concept mode of production, did not exist in societies like those, for whom the Western paradigm of production would have been meaningless.

Being black, for the then autocentric Congolese, therefore, one could be a slave, but one could also be, because free-born, a king, an artist, a priest, a warrior, a hunter. One was not circumscribed to one social role—that of being a negro/a slave, i.e., labour-power. However, in the Western semantic field and its corresponding social order, the word “Negro” was to be initiated at the beginning of Western modernity as the brand name for labour power in its pure commodity (i.e., slave) form… The slaves were bought and sold as “piezas”—pieces, in a long established rational quantified system which took the norm of productive labour power—a man of about twenty-five, of certain height, good teeth, etc., as a standard of measurement with which to calculate profit and loss, … several old slaves—above forty who were seen as “refuse” once their productive capacity had lessened with age— also made up one. What I want to note here is that the pieza/negro was, at the beginning of modernity, the first and most total example of the reduction of the creative possibilities of human men, women, and children to one single possibility—man/woman/children as material producers. It is this reduction of the human Being from the totality of our possibilities that has come to define the now fully realized, because now bourgeois form of capitalist rationality; while this form of rationality is itself only possible within the terms of the overall paradigm of production” p. 472-473).

“It is here, therefore, that the particular struggle of the black culture of the Americas—the counter-culture of the piezas—takes on universal dimensions. For the rationality of the paradigm of material production—of which the piezas on the plantation archipelago were to be the first mass victims—has extended itself globally… a new form of the original piezas Middle Passage experience links us all now, therefore, on the basis of a shared commonality of experience in which we all now find ourselves the new nameless, experience ourselves as the undifferentiated statistics of interchangeable producer-consumer units—here to increase the sale of Coca Cola or of Geritol, or alternatively, how to figure in the master plan of a techno-bureaucrat. This given that as the power of the Free-Market economic (USA) and the politico-statal (Soviet Union) processes of decision-making are processes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a large majority of mankind begin to experience ourselves as merely consumers; as, therefore, the very negation of the I, as piezas cast adrift,—without any anchor in a realized sense of self—in the contemporary world of Western and Westernized, therefore hegemonically secular, techno-industrial modernity” (p. 483-484).

“The Rastafarians’ recoding of the formal system’s concept, oppression, as that of their existentially lived phenomenological concept of “downpression”; with this “downpression”, if in their case given that “downpression,” is a one also no less experienced only at the level of their psychic dispossession, being no less experienced by the usually job-holding, therefore well-fed, reasonably affluent members of his [Marley’s] audiences; yet who, in their everyday lives, must also find themselves being on the one hand, made into interchangeable units or cogs in the now corporate system of economic production, and on the other hand, but no less so as an also interchangeable functional unit of the system, since socialised to be the docile consumers, whose ever increasing “wants”, as induced by the as industry, is now centrally indispensable to the latter’s functioning” (p. 487-488).

"The Rastafarians achieve an unyoking from the dominant world and its Symbolic order... beyond a simple inversion of terms... there is a displacement, a change of signs... their new identity['s] basic distinction is shifted from the binary opposition of black/white. Rather it is between heathens and the Sons of Jah—i.e., those who have awoken from ignorance, who have come to realize that their life on this Earth in Babylon is a life of exile, that they are strangers—"just passing through," says Marley... Their origin, their true identity—where they are from—is different. Hence their goal—the where they are going, is logically different.

Black hair, black skin is revalued as a sign, not an index. One can have a black skin and be a "heathen." One can have a "white skin" and have a "black heart": i.e., awaken to a knowledge of self as the Sons of Jah, and as such cease to perceive the self as "white"" (p.471).

Although Black experiences and histories in the New World are unique, Wynter in her analysis shows that the idea of incommensurability, very popular in Settler Colonial Studies, is perhaps not the best way to look at the varied oppressions of colonized people, people born into the New World during times of colonies, empires, and our current Postcolonial World Order (again, see Sharma). As the Rastafari philosophy allows us to see, even if we are all not oppressed to the same degree, we are all “downpressed” by the current symbolic and world order. Wynter, with her understanding of the pieza, and the capitalist relations created by the Portuguese slave-traders and New World plantation owners that commoditized Black people as “a standard of profit” or as refuse, sees clearly that while Black people have experienced some of the most abject dehumanization, we are all dehumanized by the current world order, by capitalism, by the Color Line, by everything that contributes to the “reduction of the creative possibilities of human men, women, and children to one single possibility—man/woman/children as material producers” (see also her essays In Quest of Matthew Bondsman (1981, in this collection) and especially her article Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counter Doctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis (1992) in which she elaborates more on the pieza framework). The Rastafari recognized that whiteness is another “politrick” of the ruling classes that serves to uphold a dehumanizing system. Rastafarianism and Black culture from their liminal perspectives, as Wynter shows in this and other works, holds the potential for us to recognize how the world works and change it, to create an “ecumenically human” world in which all can live and become without the artificial and material limits of oppression/downpression and the overrepresentation of Western Bourgeois Man as the only (or best) way of being human.

Joyce Pualani Warren in her 2019 article “Reading Bodies, Writing Blackness: Anti-/Blackness and Nineteenth- Century Kanaka Maoli Literary Nationalism” examines historical Hawaiian relations to Pō, the blackness from which the world was born according to the Kumulipo, described by Queen Liliʻuokalani in the subtitle of her translation as “An Account of the Creation of the World According to the Hawaiian Tradition” (Warren, p.60). Warren describes the Kumulipo as:

“the Kanaka Maoli [aboriginal Hawaiian] creation chant which details the unfolding of all life from the generative, cosmogonic blackness of Pō… The natural world, the gods, and humanity, are all linked by their genealogical succession from Pō. Thus Pō affords one access to all points of time and space in discussions of cosmogony, genealogy, ontology, and epistemology. Pō is a site of temporal and spatial expansiveness that accommodates, but does not necessarily attempt to order, all of existence” (Warren, p. 54).

If we can see the world as born of Pō, of blackness, of night which leads to day, “a liminal space” (Warren, p. 53), what world order can be created from the liminal position of Blackness today? Our modern world system was created in part from the creation of the dehumanization of the Congolese ‘“Prieto” and other Black Africans as Negroes along with the construction of the pieza system which haunts all humanity today, as do the other group-differentiating and dehumanizing ideologies that prevail. If we look at the Hawaiian Pō and modern Blackness from a transcultural perspective, which recognizes “a unity of all cultures and noncultures, that is, of those possibilities that have not yet been realized” (Mikhail Epstein, 2009, Transculture: A Broad Way Between Globalism and Multiculturalism, p. 333; see also his & Ellen Berry's 1999 Transcultural Experiments), we can connect to each other across differences as humans, connected in common relation along with more-than-human life and beings to the beginning of life on Earth, and to the Pō, the original Blackness and Night from which everything came into being, which in Hawaiian philosophy is not something only located in the past but is still present (Warren, p. 53). This understanding of Pō from which everything descends, of the wā (era, times, spaces) of the kumulipo in which everything came into the world at the different or concurrent times and places of their species’ emergence. In a way, Wynter’s work from her earliest to her latest has been, from a transcultural Hawaiian perspective, the work of another kumulipo (the Hawaiian title being He Kumulipo, A Kumulipo), a tracing of the wā from the foundation of the depths, of the blackness at the foundation of our world system, at the beginning of our modern connected-as-one-species human existence that began in the 15th century (for more in the Kumulipo, see Michael David Kaulana Ing's article "Hanau Kanaka o Mehelau: The Advent of Humanity in the Kumulipo").

As Wynter hopes throughout her œuvre especially in The Ceremony Found, an ecumenically human understanding of the world can be created. If both humanity (in Hawaiian lāhui kanaka, which is ironically the word for race, people, humanity) and more-than-human life are progeny of Pō, so too can be born of Blackness and our shared struggle and understanding an ecumenically human way of living in which we can all be free from the capitalist and other overrepresented relations that keep us from realizing our own ways of being human.

These understandings are some of Wynter’s contributions to Black Studies, a revolutionary study that Warren and others contribute to that help us understand the world so we can change it.

I highly recommend this book (which, though £40 is well worth it), and Wynter’s other work which is all available on monoskop.org/Sylvia_Wynter