Preface: Sylvia Wynter’s Agonistic Intimations

I vividly remember arriving at Sylvia Wynter’s (then) home in Palo Alto, California, on the morning of 19 November 1999 (almost exactly sixteen years ago to the day I write this) to conduct my planned interview with her.¹ She greeted me at the door with an embracing smile of incalculable width and warmth and ushered me in to the living room where we would speak over the course of the next two days. It seemed to me such a familiar space, this living room—familiar in the elegant statement of its decor and furnishing, in its formal and subdued gaiety. There was a just-so character to it, as though everything had been carefully, deliberately chosen and arranged and now resided exactly where it had always belonged. And though we had never met before, Sylvia, too, was immediately recognizable to me, in her mannered sense of poise and propriety and solidity and decorum, mixed with an undercurrent of mischief and irreverence and an altogether wicked sense of humor. She projected a no-nonsense personality and a formidable intellectual presence that gave you to understand that the time you were now spending with her was of no trifling significance and should not be wasted. It is an experience of sheer intellectual adventure I will not soon forget. In every way, I have always thought, Sylvia Wynter is entirely—and precisely—what Rex Nettleford would have called (with all its Jamaican resonances and inflections) a “lady of quality.”

At the time I set about making the systematic preparations for the interview some months before I arrived at her doorstep that November morning, I could scarcely have imagined that in the space of little more than a decade Wynter would become something of an iconic figure for a revisionist black intellectual orientation thematized around the trope or the poetics of the “human” (notably rendered in ontological tones as a substantive: the human).² Certainly she was already iconic to me—but perhaps in a less abstract or, in any case, a more circumscribed way. To me, at the time, Wynter was one of the predominant figures in a Jamaican (and, more broadly, Anglo-creole Caribbean) intellectual generation, whose work had been formative for my evolving sense of the theoretical languages of postcolonial criticism. This is how I’d come to her—feeling my way through the debates about Jamaica’s cultural-political sovereignty. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, though I had read her 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron while an undergraduate at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in the late 1970s, and had a sense of its ambiguous place in the canon-forming doxas of Caribbean literary criticism (Kenneth Ramchand’s, for example, in The West Indian Novel and Its Background), it was less this articulation of her creative impulse that captured my imagination than the nonfiction essays of the late 1960s and early 1970s.³ For in these essays, it seemed to me, one could discern, at least in outline, agonistic intimations of a generative style of literary-cultural criticism that turned around the attempt to summon into theoretical intelligibility the paradoxical situation of the African presence in the slave and postslave plantation complexes of the New World. There is no way to even sketch here (much less detail) the rich complexity of the problem-space in which these essays intervene during the first decade of Jamaica’s political independence, but to me essays such as “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture” and “Jonkonnu in Jamaica” mark out a field-forming model of cultural-political theoretical work that, in part at least, sought to work out the answer to a question that might be formulated as follows: How might we figure the relational conundrum of an African presence that was at once an object in the dehumanization and acculturation of colonized life and a subject in the rehumanization and indigenization of “native” black life?⁴

The interview with Sylvia Wynter was, I believe, the sixth I conducted with Caribbean writers and the fifth actually published in Small Axe. It therefore...