Read Theory to Me - Unsettling the Coloniality of Being (2003) SYLVIA WYNTER

FULL CITATION: Sylvia Wynter. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

EXCERPT: PART I The Janus Face of the Invention of "Man": Laws of Nature and the Thinkability of Natural, rather than Supernatural versus the Dynamics of the Colonizer/Colonized Answer to the Question of Who/What We Are

In this text, Wynter is giving a historical, conceptual, and theological analysis of how particular conceptions of "the human" have emerged and been used over time. She looks especially at the theological logics (theologics) of Western colonial concepts of "Man" as they shift from Man1 (Christian religious) to Man2 (religio-secular), compounding a "descriptive statement" of the ostensibly only normal human (Christian, white, male) "Man." Fundamentally inventing a new mode of cultural critique, theology, political philosophy, and poetry that is akin with "Conceptual Ethics," Wynter describes HOW the overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human was conceptualized in terms of models of the supernatural vs. the natural (etc) in order to then show how representational/conceptual/theological representations have served to legitimate the subordination of the world and orient it around this central, overdetermined "Self."

NOTE: Wynter is known for her layered rhetorical style with parentheticals, hyphenated terms, "scare quotes," and portmanteaus, all woven into paragraph-long sentences. I have done my best to read aloud, but some of the musicality is lost in my voice since "inside the mind" has more tonal variance and comprehension of punctuation.