The Event of the anti-colonial struggle which began in the case of a
then British Jamaica in the late 1930s, cut across the childhood and
early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the raison d'être of the
first phase of her important body of work seen in this collection. The
imperative of decolonizing the order of discourse that had legitimated
the then imperial order (that is, to the colonizer as well to the
colonized), gave rise to a theoretically sustained argument manifest
here in a set of seminal critical and historical essays. At the time of
their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative
playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive
literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This
intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that
include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley
and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of
Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de
Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627).
Across this varied range of topics, a coherent and consistent thread of
argument emerges from Wynter's oeuvre. In the vein of C. L. R. James,
she placed the history of Spanish Jamaica (and therefore the Caribbean)
in the context of the founding of the post-1492 European settler
colonies in the New World, which remained an indispensable element in
the first stage of the institutionalization of the Western world system.
Therefore, a central imperative of her initial work has always been to
reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern
world, but doing so, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no
longer from the normative perspective of the settler archipelago, but
rather more inclusively, from those of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and
that of ex-slave (i.e. Negro) archipelagos; this latter, as what she
defines, adapting Enrique Dussel's terms, as the "gaze from below"
perspective of "the ultimate underside of modernity."
Strongly influenced by Marx together with Black thinkers such as Aimé
Césaire, Jean Price-Mars (seen in the Jonkunnu essay), W. E. B. Du Bois
and Frantz Fanon, and with an appreciation of the insights brought by
the New Studies of the Sixties (including that of Black redemptive
co-humanist thought, feminism), Wynter's work has sought, from its
origin, to find a comprehensive explanatory system able to integrate
these knowledges, ones born of struggle.
This volume makes an important contribution to restoring to view an
essential strand in the 500-year emergent thought generated from the
slave/ex-slave archipelago of the Caribbean and the Americas--thought
important to what our increasingly integrated world-system, the first
such in human history.
