A first-hand participant in the liberation struggles of the 1960s in the Carribean, merciless crushed by US imperialism, Wynter has developed a unique and uniquely challenging political proposal. Rejecting any notion of a universal political subject, the fraudulent legacy of what she considers the ‘universal man’ of the Enlightenment, Wynter proposes a pluralistic counter-humanism which generates social coherency without suppressing difference. Wynter's thinks with Fanon to produce a dynamic humanism re-enchanted with its own always renegotiated contingency, ‘human being as a practice’. Deeply concerned with technological and scientific advance, Wynter confronts the specialising and standardizing tendency of homo oeconomicus with the story-telling and meaning-making homo narrans. What Wynter refers to as Enlightenment “mono-humanism” which posits a universal “homo oeconomicus” is contrasted with a dynamic counter-humanism, of “being human as a practice.”. In her adherence to the figure of human being, Wynter takes Fanon's critique of coloniality down a different path from afro-pessimism.
References:
sylvia.wynter-the.re-enchantment.of.humanism-an.interview with David Scott
Black Metamorphosis: A Prelude to Sylvia Wynter's Theory of the Human