Wikipedia Deep Dive

Sylvia Wynter

11 min read

What if everything you've been taught about what it means to be human is actually a story? Not a universal truth, but a particular narrative—invented by a specific group of people, in a specific time and place, to serve specific purposes?

This is the unsettling question that has animated the life's work of Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican-born thinker who, at ninety-seven years old, remains one of the most radical voices challenging how we understand ourselves as a species.

A Life Spanning Continents and Disciplines

Wynter was born in 1928 in Holguín, Cuba, to Jamaican parents—her mother Lola Maude was an actress, her father Percival a tailor. The family returned to Jamaica when Sylvia was just two years old. She grew up in Kingston, proving herself an exceptional student early on. At nine, she won a scholarship to St Andrew High School for Girls. At eighteen, she claimed an even more prestigious prize: the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which carried her across the Atlantic to King's College London.

There, she studied Spanish and modern languages, eventually completing a master's thesis on a classical Spanish comedy in 1953. But Wynter was never content to stay in one intellectual lane.

She wrote plays. She wrote a novel. She married the Guyanese writer Jan Carew and collaborated with him on screenplays. Her 1962 novel, The Hills of Hebron, emerged from a stage play she had written four years earlier, purchased by the prestigious Royal Court Theatre in London. The Jamaican government commissioned her to write about the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865—a pivotal moment when Jamaican peasants rose up against colonial oppression—and to pen a biography of Alexander Bustamante, independent Jamaica's first prime minister.

By the mid-1970s, Wynter had crossed another ocean, this time to California. She joined the University of California at San Diego to pioneer a program in what was then called "Third World literature." In 1977, she moved to Stanford University, where she would spend two decades as a professor of Spanish and chair of African and Afro-American Studies. She became Professor Emerita there and was awarded the Order of Jamaica in 2010 for her contributions to education, history, and culture.

The Central Insight: We Made This Up

To understand Wynter's work, you have to start with a deceptively simple observation: humans are storytelling creatures.

Other animals are shaped by their biology. A bee does what bees do because of its genetic programming. But humans? We do what we do largely because of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what matters, and how we should live. We are, as Wynter puts it, homo narrans—the narrating animal.

This might sound obvious. But Wynter pushes the insight much further than most of us are comfortable going.

If we are fundamentally shaped by our stories, then the story we tell about what it means to be human is perhaps the most important story of all. It determines who counts as fully human and who doesn't. It shapes whose suffering matters and whose can be ignored. It decides who gets to flourish and who gets exploited.

And here's Wynter's devastating claim: for the last several centuries, one particular group—Western European men—has been telling a very specific story about humanness. They have made their particular way of being human seem like the only way of being human. They have, in Wynter's memorable phrase, "overrepresented" themselves.

The Three Versions of "Man"

Wynter traces this overrepresentation through three historical stages, each producing a different version of what she calls "Man" with a capital M—not humanity in its fullness, but a narrow, exclusionary ideal presented as universal.

Christian Man

The first version emerged in medieval Europe. Here, the ideal human was defined in religious terms: a Christian soul seeking salvation through alignment with divine law. Europe positioned itself as the site of spiritual truth. Everyone else—pagans, Muslims, Jews, Indigenous peoples—were infidels, excluded from full humanity by their failure to worship the correct God.

This wasn't simply religious bigotry. It was a complete system for organizing the world. It determined who could own land, who could be enslaved, whose testimony counted in court, whose lives had value. The story of Christian Man made European colonization feel not just permissible but righteous—a mission to save benighted souls.

Man 1: The Rational Human

The Renaissance and Enlightenment brought a new story. God faded into the background. What made someone truly human wasn't their relationship to the divine but their capacity for reason.

This was the era of Descartes declaring "I think, therefore I am," and Locke theorizing about natural rights. In many ways, it represented genuine progress—the seeds of democracy, human rights, and scientific inquiry. But Wynter points to a dark underside.

The "rational Man" of the Enlightenment was implicitly white, male, bourgeois, and European. His reason was demonstrated through particular markers: literacy, property ownership, adherence to European customs. Those who didn't display these markers—African peoples, Indigenous peoples, the poor, women—were deemed irrational, primitive, childlike. Not fully human.

This provided the intellectual architecture for the transatlantic slave trade. Africans weren't being enslaved despite Enlightenment values; the enslavement was justified through Enlightenment values. They were classified as lacking the rational capacity for self-governance, making their subjugation not just economically convenient but philosophically defensible.

Man 2: Economic Man

The most recent version, emerging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, defines humanity through the lens of biology and economics. This is homo oeconomicus—the economic human, the entrepreneurial self-maximizer, the rational actor of neoliberal theory.

On the surface, Man 2 seems more objective than his predecessors. He doesn't appeal to God or explicitly invoke race. He speaks the neutral language of science and markets. But Wynter argues the exclusions remain, now dressed in new clothing.

Under Man 2, your worth correlates with your economic productivity. Those who fail to compete successfully in markets—the poor, the disabled, inhabitants of the global South—aren't explicitly called subhuman. They're just described as "underdeveloped," lacking the traits needed to succeed. The hierarchy persists; only the vocabulary has changed.

Fanon and the Sociogenic Principle

One of Wynter's key intellectual debts is to Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary whose Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remain foundational texts in postcolonial thought.

Fanon introduced the concept of "sociogeny"—the idea that human experience isn't purely biological but is fundamentally shaped by social and cultural forces. We aren't just products of our genes and neurons; we're products of the stories, symbols, and social systems we inhabit.

Wynter seizes on this insight and pushes it even further. If humans are sociogenic beings—shaped by culture as much as biology—then the very categories we use to understand ourselves are up for grabs. Including the category of "human" itself.

This has profound implications. If "the human" is a story we tell, then it's a story we can retell. The overrepresentation of Man isn't a fact of nature; it's a cultural achievement that can be culturally challenged.

Wynter is fascinated by the cultural formations that have resisted European hegemony: Myal and Rastafari in Jamaica, Vodou in Haiti, Jonkonnu carnival traditions throughout the Caribbean. These aren't merely "surviving" cultures waiting to be developed into proper modernity. They represent alternative ways of being human—what she calls "a zero ground and catalytic zone of resistance."

What Would It Mean to Reimagine the Human?

Wynter's project isn't merely critical. She doesn't simply want to tear down Western humanism and leave rubble. She wants to rebuild—to imagine new possibilities for what being human could mean.

What might that look like?

First, it would mean recognizing that there are many "genres of the human," not just one. Different cultures have developed different ways of being human, with different values, different relationships to nature, different modes of knowledge. These aren't failed attempts at Western modernity; they're alternatives to it.

Second, it would mean taking seriously the idea that we are homo narrans—storytelling creatures. This isn't a weakness to be overcome through objective science. It's fundamental to who we are. Any adequate understanding of humanity has to grapple with our narrative nature.

Third—and this is where Wynter's thinking gets genuinely radical—it would mean creating new stories. Not recovering some authentic pre-colonial past, but inventing new ways of understanding ourselves that don't reproduce the exclusions of Man.

The Challenge of Reading Wynter

It should be said: Wynter's writing is notoriously difficult. Her essays are dense, allusive, drawing on everything from neuroscience to literary theory to the history of Caribbean plantation systems. She coins neologisms and builds elaborate conceptual architectures. A single essay can stretch to eighty pages.

Part of this difficulty is strategic. Wynter believes the very languages we've inherited—the conceptual vocabularies of Western philosophy and social science—are contaminated by the overrepresentation of Man. To think differently, we may need to write differently, even at the cost of accessibility.

Part of it is simply the scope of what she's attempting. Wynter isn't trying to contribute to one academic discipline; she's trying to rethink the foundations of human self-understanding. That's an ambitious project, and ambitious projects rarely fit into tidy prose.

But beneath the complexity, her core insights are remarkably clear: We made up the story of "the human." The story we made up serves particular interests. We could tell different stories. We should.

Why This Matters Now

Wynter began developing these ideas in the 1960s and 1970s, but they've found new resonance in recent years. Scholars in Black studies, decolonial thought, and critical theory increasingly cite her as a foundational figure. Her work speaks to contemporary concerns about racial justice, environmental crisis, and the limits of liberal democracy.

Consider climate change. The environmental crisis is, in Wynter's terms, a crisis of Man 2—the economic human who treats nature as a resource to be exploited for maximum productivity. Addressing it may require not just new technologies but new stories about human flourishing, ones that don't define success in terms of endless accumulation.

Or consider the ongoing struggles over whose lives matter, whose suffering commands attention, whose humanity is presumed versus whose must be constantly proven. These are struggles over the very definition of the human—exactly the terrain Wynter has been mapping for decades.

Her work offers no easy answers. It doesn't provide a blueprint for the society we should build or the values we should hold. What it offers instead is a clearing—a space in which the taken-for-granted can become visible, and alternatives can begin to be imagined.

The Playwright, the Novelist, the Philosopher

It's worth remembering that Wynter came to philosophy through literature and drama. Her first major works weren't academic essays but plays and a novel. She understands, in her bones, the power of storytelling.

This biographical fact isn't incidental to her philosophy. It helps explain why she takes narrative so seriously as a category of analysis, why she sees human beings as fundamentally story-shaped creatures, why she believes that changing our stories can change our world.

In one of her most cited essays, "No Humans Involved"—written as an open letter to colleagues in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising—Wynter examines how the Los Angeles Police Department used the code "N.H.I." to classify cases involving young Black men. No humans involved. The bureaucratic language made explicit what the broader culture implied: some lives counted less.

That essay is vintage Wynter: taking a specific, concrete instance of dehumanization and connecting it to the deepest structures of Western thought. The N.H.I. classification wasn't a departure from humanism; it was humanism's dark truth, the exclusion that had always been built into the story of Man.

An Invitation to Think Dangerously

Reading Wynter is an invitation to think dangerously—to question not just particular beliefs but the frameworks within which beliefs are formed. She asks us to consider that the very categories we use to make sense of ourselves might be tools of domination, that the story of "the human" might be the most powerful story ever told precisely because we've forgotten it's a story.

This is unsettling. It's meant to be.

But it's also liberating. If being human isn't a fixed fact but an ongoing creative project, then we aren't trapped. The stories that have excluded and dehumanized can be challenged. New stories can be written. New ways of being human can be imagined and lived.

Sylvia Wynter, now in her late nineties, has spent a lifetime on this project. Her work remains unfinished—partly because her major manuscript, Black Metamorphosis, was never fully published, partly because the project of reimagining the human is necessarily ongoing. But the questions she raises grow only more urgent with time.

What story of the human are we living inside? Who benefits from that story, and who is harmed? What other stories might be possible?

These are the questions Wynter leaves us with. Answering them is our work to do.