Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the Promise of Science

This essay explores the ways in which scientific knowledge is taken up in the writings of Sylvia Wynter. The first section outlines Wynter’s intellectual project, followed with a discussion of how science and scientia emerge in her writings and enable her conceptualization of the human. The second section explores, broadly, why science matters to race and racism. The third section thinks about how our contemporary scientific framings—biocentric, Darwinian—inform academic positionalities and foreclose cross-disciplinary conversations. The final section brings these three areas together, looking specifically at the ways in which the creative labour of Jimi Hendrix is demonstrative of Wynter’s scientia project.