Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

This essay focuses on Sylvia Wynter's explorations of Frantz Fanon’s concept of sociogenesis and links it to her ethical interrogation of the concept of Human and Humanity—from the European Renaissance to contemporary investigations of biotechnology and neurophysiology. Wynter’s critical genealogy of the human is read alongside the author’s own thesis—which works through the geo-politics and coloniality of knowledge and being—in order to demonstrate her crucial contribution to decolonial thinking and the advancement of the decolonial option in epistemology, politics and ethics.