Black Feminism and Figures of the Black Mater(nal) Restricted; Files Only
Stevenson, Morinade (Spring 2024)
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to reconsider Sylvia Wynter’s theory of humanism. This theoretical posture situates Wynter’s extensive oeuvre within a western universalism; one that Wynter staunchly rejects in her early interventions. In my endeavor to reinterpret her theory of humanism, the overall aim of my project thus became to read Wynter’s work within the Caribbean context of her earlier writings. Although her later work fully tends towards a humanism which, as she says, re-enchants humanism, I argued that her notion of liminality should not be read from a western point of view.
This dissertation contends with questions of Black being and the question of humanism that has recently re-emerged in scholarship on the work of Sylvia Wynter. I consider questions concerning the limits of discourse and its ability to account for the being of Black(ened) subjects in accordance with the figure of the human in Wynterian scholarship. With Wynter’s work contextualized, I make a critical intervention into the fields of Black feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and black critical theory. When one reads her earlier scholarship, one finds coupled with her extensive account of the plantation system on the islands, an understanding of education as initiation into a culture that produces the conundrum I chart across multiple chapters. Her work investigates asks: How does one combat the violent imposition of a white culture that incessantly insists on the inferiority of black persons? And what tools are available to Caribbean people to combat what happens at the level of the psyche when such messages are internalized? Any account that seeks to seriously engage with the work of Wynter must consider this period as pivotal to the development of her later scholarship, which unfolds while teaching in the U.S.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 – Wynter’s Humanism: Why is Wynter a humanist? 17
§1 Wynter’s Use of Marxism 21
§2 “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”: A Marxist Account of the novel form 25
§3 “Ceremony Must Be Found” (1984) 29
§4 1492 (1995) 31
§5 Note on Method: Wynter and Foucault 37
§6 Genealogical and Dialectical Thinking in Wynter 41
§7 Wynter’s Autopoesis 44
Chapter 2 – Wynter: Epistemological Thrust 49
§1 On Language 50
§2 Wynter: Caribbean Autopoeisis 55
§3 Fanon: Ontogeny vs Sociogeny 57
§4 Palmer: The World—Being/Sensing/Knowing 66
§5 Use of Wynter’s methodology: On the Symbol 69
§6 DANA 73
§7 The Problem of Stereotypes and its Answer on the Interpretive model 74
Chapter 3 – Fungibility and Plasticity 78
§1 Discursive Space 79
§2 On Sovereignty and the Body 85
§3 Denise Ferreira da Silva on Sovereignty 92
§4 Permanent State of Injury: State Sanctioned Violence against Black (non)citizens 95
§5 Rizvana Bradley: The Question of Form 98
§6 The Aesthetic Subject 104
§7 Jackson’s Black mater(nal) figure and the Sublime 106
§8 Black Femininity and death 116
§9 Without a Body 119
Chapter 4 – Wynter’s Early Works 123
§1 The Concept of the National Hero 125
§2 The Nation and the Symbol 127
§3 Language Reconsidered 129
§4Medieval Race and Blackness 133
§5 Creole Dialect 140
§6 Stuart Hall 151
§7 Édouard Glissant 154
§8 The Nation: Creolization and Myth Making 158
§9 Invention and Caribbean Poetics 161
§10 Katherine McKittrick on Demonic Ground(s) 169
§11 Critical Fabulation 1734
Coda 180
The Cyborg 188
References 199
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2030 | 2024-04-28 20:41:50 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2030 |
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