Sylvia Wynter's Critique of the Human

Sylvia Wynter (born 1928 in Cuba to Jamaican parents, raised in Jamaica) trained initially in modern languages at the University of London in the 1940s and worked for years as a novelist, playwright, and cultural critic in Jamaica and the United Kingdom before her thought turned toward the systematic philosophical and historical project for which she is now best known: a genealogical critique of the modern Western concept of "the human." Wynter's central and most influential claim, developed across decades of essays and most fully synthesized in her widely cited 2003 article "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument," is that what Western modernity presents as simply "the human" as such is in fact a specific, historically produced genre of the human that Wynter calls "Man," a category that falsely claims universal, species-wide validity while in fact overrepresenting one particular, historically situated conception.