Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations

Building on a discussion and interview that began in 2007, this conversation between Katherine McKittrick Sylvia Wynter tracks and particularizes Wynter’s larger intellectual project. Key areas of inquiry include knowledge production, black studies, Blombos Cave, the figure of homo oeconomicus, Copernicus, autopoeisis, global warming, and the writings of W.E.B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon. These themes, and many more, are read with and against the monumental narrative of race, and the ways in which what it means to be human, in the present, is anchored to systems of knowledge that are invested in replicating practices of marginalization and economic accumulation. The conversation, importantly, also develops and extends Aimé Césaire’s “science of the word” and thinks through how storytelling and our physiologies are enmeshed—which Wynter understands through her assertion of human being as praxis and a bios-mythois outlook that interrupts how we presently know our collective world and opens up a ways to give humanness a different future.