Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican novelist, dramatist, critic, and essayist. Her work is highly poetic, expository, and complex, seeking to elucidate the development and maintenance of modernity and the modern human. She interweaves science, astrology, and critical race theory to explain how the European man becomes the epitome of humanity. Wynter argues that the West uses race to answer the question of who and what we are, particularly after the Enlightenment rendered religion incapable of answering that question.
Set in the late 1950s during Jamaica's transition to independence, the narrative follows formerly enslaved Jamaicans striving to build a new life while confronting colonial authority. The characters embody resilience and determination as they navigate the challenges of asserting their identity and autonomy in a changing society. The story captures the spirit of a pivotal moment in Jamaican history, highlighting themes of freedom, self-determination, and the struggle against oppression.
"The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go beyond making an argument against colonialism, but set out to decolonize the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order. 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 thread of argument emerges. In the vein of C. L. R. James, the imperative of her work has always been to reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern world, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no longer from the normative European perspective, but rather more inclusively, from the "gaze from below" of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and the ex-slave (i.e. Negro), which is "the ultimate underside of modernity."" -- Peepal Tree Press website (viewed April 21, 2022)
