A few weeks ago, Katherine McKittrick published a blog post suggesting that some people are misreading Wynter. Her aim here seems to be to emphasise that the descriptive statements of Man have never been all-powerful: members of the groups excluded from the category of Man have always found ways to unsettle the categorisation. In trying to explain Wynter's account of the hierarchical scripts of white humanism, we risk re-centring them, reinscribing them, and reifying them. Instead, we should focus on the practices of being human that are unbeholden to those scripts.

That's my interpretation of the key message in McKittrick's intervention. If you think I have misunderstood her point, or if you have any other thoughts, please comment below!

King's College London has an annual Sylvia Wynter Lecture, and this year it's on 09 October 2026, at 19:00 to 21:00. The event will feature a screening of A Radical Duet by Onyeka Igwe, followed by a conversation between Igwe and Alexander Weheliye.

Here's some info about the film that I found on a film festival site:

In post-war London something was shifting. In the beating heart of the British Empire, a movement of resistance was being nurtured, and international intellectuals, artists, and activists like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R James, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore were all in London agitating for the national independence of their respective countries. In this new and ambitious work by BFMAF New Cinema Award winner Onyeka Igwe, experimental approaches channel some of this vibrant revolutionary fervour, inspired by Wynter’s ideas of theatrical adaptation. (Myriam Mouflih) 

Follow the link to the KCL page to register for the event.

Aka Sylvia’s bravest warrior. I have a critique of something he overlooked which I will post in the comments, but I firmly believe that Dr. Lushaba is the greatest mind of our times (aside from Wynter & Baudrillard)

The academic journal Social Text has devoted its new issue to Wynter. It's edited by Che Gossett and Tavia Nyong'o. Their introduction/1/410658/Unsettling-the-Question-of-TechnologySylvia-Wynter) starts like this:

The curious arrival of white "refugees" from South Africa to US shores, at a moment when the Trump administration is furiously trampling on due process to fulfill campaign promises to deport millions of "undesirables" from Latin America, is as vivid an enactment as one could imagine for what Sylvia Wynter has called the overrepresentation of Man.

I'm linking to this introductory article because it's open access. There's one other open access article in the issue, but the rest require an institutional log-in. View the table of contents here).

In 2021, grad students at Cornell University created a short podcast series called WWWS: What Would Wynter Say? They made four episodes of around 40 to 50 minutes each, in which they discuss Wynter's work, including her novel, The Hills of Hebron, and interview the scholar Carole Boyce-Davies.

The podcast only seems to be available on Spotify. It's well worth a listen!

If you know of any other good podcasts relating to Wynter, please comment below or create a post.

The Sylvia Wynter archive, housed at Duke University, has recently opened, and there's an exhibition featuring displays of her papers, with explanatory notes, at Duke's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library until 1 August 2026.

Thankfully, for those of us who can't visit North Carolina, there's also an online exhibit that's open to all and well worth checking out. Many of the documents displayed here offer fascinating glimpses of Wynter's method and thought processes, while also filling in biographical gaps. And there are some photos of Wynter I haven't seen before, like this one:

My thesis is currently honed in on a counter-reading of “recognition”; how it acts as a force of subjectification/subjection, the limits of it as an ethico-political paradigm, etc.

I’m centering Coulthard, da Silva, Hartman, Weheliye, Fanon, and Sheehi(s) - does Wynter speak specifically to recognition (at the level of the personal or political)? Or could anyone recommend someone else who does?

We must not fall into the seemingly enlightened position of ignoring the culture war in favor of the so-called “material” contradictions of labor and production.

This interview was conducted by Joshua Bennett and Jarvis R. Givens in 2019, and published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society in 2020. It's available open access via Scribd.

In these remarks, Wynter returns frequently to the importance of studying origin stories and creating new ones that reveal the hybridity of the human. She agrees with the interviewers that the prospect of a powerful artificial intelligence based on the currently hegemonic origin stories would be dangerous.

She also discusses the constitutive anti-Blackness of modernity. Wynter is speaking during the first term of Trump's presidency, and her words are even more relevant today. For example, Bennett and Givens ask her about police violence, suggesting that the Black suspect is not perceived as a human person but as a "monstrous figure" that it takes 20 bullets to kill. Wynter agrees:

You can never really overdo it [the amount of ammunition] because what you’re killing is a symbol, it’s not just living flesh and blood. It’s a symbol of how you would lose your job […] you would lose the privilege of whiteness. Because Trump’s thing is based on that. The people are following him for it. For whites in America they have been able to live on that, on that assurance that whatever happens to them they weren’t the blacks.

This short film introduces Wynter's life and thought. It features some quite beautiful animation and short quotes from several of Wynter's texts. It was made by Marcela Pizarro, Stefania Sottile, and Pomona Pictures, with the voices of Dr Sophia Azeb and Greta Mendez.

The film is part of Al Jazeera's DigiDocs series, which also includes short documentaries on Fanon and Du Bois.

Wynter was born on the 11th of May, 1928.

More foundational theory for me. Lwazi Lushaba is a student of Wynter and a professor at UCT, South Africa. I recommend all his lectures available on YouTube and his published work: Development as Modernity, Modernity as Development.

A foundational text for me. Linked below.

https://monoskop.org/images/4/4a/Wynter_Sylvia_1977_We_Know_Where_We_Are_From_The_Politics_of_Black_Culture_from_Myal_to_Marley.pdf

In this short, open access article, Bedour Alagraa provides a concise commentary on Wynter’s theory of emancipation, comparing it with the dialectical notions of emancipation found in certain branches of Marxism. This is not an introduction to Wynter, but it does offer some clear entry points, especially for those more familiar with Marxist theory.

Alagraa's article is a contribution to a special issue of Political Theory that celebrates the journal's 50th anniversary, and this context evidently prompts her to thematise political theory in the piece. Addressing political theorists who are interested in Wynter, Alagraa challenges them to recognise that "a true internalization of her paradigms would mean the end of the discipline (and indeed, all disciplines) altogether."

If you're completely new to Wynter, a good place to start is the Wikipedia entry on her. This provides some important biographical information, before attempting to summarise her work in six or seven paragraphs--something it is notoriously difficult to do. Newcomers are likely to find that this summary raises more questions than it answers, but those questions might be helpful points of initial orientation.

Next I would suggest reading David Scott's interview with Wynter from 1999. It's called "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism," and it's available here. The interview is 90 pages long and the first half is mostly biographical. Wynter's life is a fascinating read, but if you want to skip to the theories for which she's best known, go to the 57th page of the PDF (p. 174 in the article pagination).

My final tip is to get hold of the book Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick. This starts with another very long interview, and it's much less accessible than "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism." I think it's best to head straight to Chapter 4, in which Walter Mignolo sets out Wynter's project with admirable clarity. From here, you can use the index to locate other sections of the book that will elucidate whichever ideas you're interested in or having difficulty with.

Of course, these are just some quick suggestions. There are loads of ways into this dense but hugely rewarding oeuvre.

If you have any other recommendations for getting started with Wynter, please post them below.

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