Anti-Colonial Beginnings. Re-examining Sylvia Wynter’s foundationalism

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table One: Historical Sociological Perspectives on Race and Racism

Abstract

This article re-examines Sylvia Wynter’s mid-period critique of Western humanism by isolating a specific methodological pressure in her project: a genealogical drive to ground critique in origins that tends to crystallise into an epochal caesura (1492) asked to carry disproportionate explanatory weight. Without dismissing Wynter’s indispensable contribution to Black Atlantic thought, the article argues that her emancipatory objectives do not require this foundationalist architecture. Drawing on Edward W. Said’s account of beginnings, and extending it through a compact typology of beginning as temporal form, political founding, and practical repetition, it proposes ‘anti-colonial beginnings’ as an alternative analytic that shifts attention from the question of which origin founded ‘Man’ to how alternative genres of the human are enacted, institutionalised, and sustained over time. The argument is developed through three contemporaneous anticolonial repertoires of ‘beginning again’: Cabral’s grounded materialism and politics of the soil; Senghor’s disciplined synthesis oriented to ‘Integral Man’; and Claudia Jones’s diasporic-institutional praxis of internationalist organisation and cultural invention. Taken together, they clarify why anticolonial politics is better understood through routes and repeated recomposition than through redemptive roots.

Author

• Filipe Carreira da Silva, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge