Sylvia Wynter

The Honourable Sylvia Wynter, O.J. (born 11 May 1928),[1] is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist[2] critic and essayist.[3]

Biography

Sylvia Wynter was born in Cuba to Percival Wynter and Lola Maude Wynter (née Reid). At the age of two she returned to her home country, Jamaica, with her parents (both born there) and was educated at the St. Andrew High School for Girls. In 1946 she was awarded the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which took her to King's College London, to read for the B.A. honours in modern languages (Spanish) from 1947 to 1949. She was awarded the M.A. in December 1953 for her thesis, an edition of a Spanish comedia, A lo que obliga el honor.

In 1958 Wynter met the Guyanese novelist Jan Carew, who became her second husband. With Carew, she wrote pieces for the BBC and completed Under the Sun, a full-length stage play, which was bought by the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1962 Wynter published her only novel, The Hills of Hebron.

After separating from Carew in the early 1960s, Wynter returned to academic study. In 1963, she was appointed assistant lecturer in Hispanic literature at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. She remained there until 1974. During this time the Jamaican government asked her to write Ballad for a Rebellion and a biography of Sir Alexander Bustamante, the first prime minister of independent Jamaica.

Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego to be a visiting professor for 1974-75. She then became chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University in 1977. She is now Professor Emerita at Stanford University.

In the mid- to late 1960s Wynter began writing critical articles addressing her interests in Caribbean, Latin American, and Spanish history and literatures. In 1968 and 1969 she published We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism. Wynter has since written numerous articles in which she seeks to rethink the fullness of human ontologies, which, she argues, have been curtailed by what she describes as an over-representation of (western bourgeois) Man as if it/he were the only available mode of complete humanness. She suggests how multiple knowledge sources and texts might frame our worldview differently.

In 2010, Sylvia Wynter was awarded the Order of Jamaica (OJ) for services in the fields of education, history and culture.[2][3]

Critical work

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.

Works

Novel

Drama

Essays/criticism

"Novel and History, Plot and Plantation" (1971), Savacou.

References

  1. ↑ Chang, Victor L. (1986). "Sylvia Winter (1928 - )". In Dance, Daryl C. Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 498–507. ISBN 978-0-313-23939-7.
  2. ↑ "Five get OJ", Jamaica Observer, 6 August 2010.
  3. ↑ "Sylvia Wynter awarded the Order of Jamaica - Hon Professor Wynter's response to the letter of congratulations on her award sent by Professor Brian Meeks on behalf of the CCT", Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica.

Sources

Further reading

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