Transnational Africana Women’s Fictions

Cheryl Sterling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000461046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria africana

This book explores the works of women writers and filmmakers across the African and African Diaspora world, reflecting on how the transnational sphere can serve to highlight voices that were at the margins of gender and race hierarchies.

The book demonstrates how in discourse and theory Africana women are the centers of their own knowledge production and agency, as the artists and their characters point the way forward. Their multi-perspectivism leads to avenues of selective mutuality and influence to generate transformative creative work, scholarship, and practices. Writers included are Sylvia Wynter, Edwidge Danticat, Amanda Smith, Werewere Liking, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Sefi Atta, NoViolet Bulawayo, Nnedi Okorafor, Mariama Bâ, Ama Ata Aidoo, Igiaba Scego, Léonara Miano, Gisèle Hountondji, Monique Ilboudo, and Maryse Condé, as well as filmmaker Kemi Adetiba. Over the course of the book, the contributors critically explore and update the canon on women in the African and African Diaspora literary sphere, highlighting their contributions to theoretical debates and providing substantive nuance to diasporic subjectivity.

This book will be of interest to scholars of African and Africana Studies, comparative literature, and women and gender studies.

Part I
Agents of change and producers of knowledge

1
Beyond the profession

Sylvia Wynter’s Decolonial University

Anthony Bayani Rodriguez

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177272-3

Over the past three decades, interdisciplinary interest in the critical humanism of decolonial theorist and first-generation Black Studies professor Sylvia Wynter has led to the establishment of a body of literature that I characterize as “Wynterian Studies.” “Wynterian Studies” has been propelled by the individual and collaborative efforts of scholars throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, beginning in the early 1990s. Wynter’s scholarship on modern liberal humanism has proven especially appealing because it offers a transdisciplinary framework, rooted in Caribbean anticolonial thought, which historicizes the ideological foundations of contemporary neoliberal racial regimes. It also advances a model of decolonial critique grounded in traditions of socially transformative political activity initiated by racially subjugated people across the 20th-century Atlantic world. The central charge of Wynter’s decolonial framework is that scholars throughout the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences, must play a role in moving beyond modern conceptualizations of “the human” as a purely economically and biologically determined species.

Wynter’s scholarship on the historical relationship between modern humanism and the emergence of modern racial regimes represents a poignant model for challenging the “post-racial” conceits of late 20th and early 21st century regimes of state-sanctioned social inequality.

The decolonizing intellectual communities she participated in, during her life in Britain, Jamaica, and the United States, from the 1950s to the 1990s, are each part of a decolonial Atlantic tradition founded upon epistemic ruptures initiated by the historic, political, cultural, and intellectual insurgencies of western racial-capitalist modernity’s structurally subordinated and “narratively condemned” populations. Wynter’s critical humanism questions fundamental fictions that animate our early 21st century global system. She furthermore lays bare the transnational implications of our present and imminent social/environmental/ecological catastrophes.

This chapter elaborates on critical periods in Sylvia Wynter’s early intellectual life, that saw the emergence of new terrains of social inquiry, as well as vibrant spaces for envisioning radical antiracist, anticapitalist, and anticolonial social transformation.

Wynter’s early years

Wynter’s experiences as a child of sugar laborers amid historic struggles against the colonial order, are important prefaces to her subsequent life in Britain and the US. Her early positioning within the pipeline of the colonial education system as a potential intellectual asset to an independent Jamaican nation was perhaps one the more significant factors that made possible her subsequent life as a student and professional dramatist in London between 1947 and 1961.

In the one-hundred-year period between the abolition of slavery in 1834 and the mass workers rebellions in the 1930s, Jamaican colonial education could be summarized in a statement from a debate that took place in the 1894 proceedings of the Jamaican Legislative Council: “Let them receive such an education as would benefit their station in life” (qtd. in Hamilton 137). Wynter’s journey through the pipeline of the Jamaican education system coincided with the political–cultural shift initiated by post-World War I Jamaican nationalist political parties. Wynter was among a generation of children who experienced firsthand the efforts to change the secondary schools from comprising students with the “ability to pay” to students with the “ability to benefit” from formal education. In 1946 Wynter was declared a recipient of the Centenary Scholarship, which provided her with the opportunity to continue her studies in London.

She was among an important generation of Caribbean women to become professors, fiction writers, and public intellectuals.

While composed predominantly of university-educated men, the Caribbean Left intelligentsia during the 1940s and 1950s presented an arena of critical social inquiry in which Wynter found opportunities to share their critical intellectual labor. Although the number of Caribbean and West African women in London remained small until the 1940s, among the formally educated minority of this community of immigrant women was a generation of West Indian women writers who would begin to grapple with the experience of Caribbean decolonization from within the metropole. The most well-known Caribbean women students from the 14-year period that Wynter spent in London included: Beryl Gilroy, who attended the University of London between 1951 and 1953; Elsa Goveia and future diplomat Jamaican Lucille Walton (later Mathurin-Mair), who both entered the University of London in 1945; and Jean D’Costa, who received advanced degrees at Oxford University in 1962. Paralleling the migrations of West Indian and West African intellectuals to Britain were also their migrations to the US, where they collaborated with students and faculty at American universities involved in early Black Studies initiatives, as well as at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in modern languages at King’s College from 1947 to 1949, Wynter went on to pursue a master’s degree from the University of London. She graduated in December 1953, with recognition as having produced a groundbreaking contribution to the historiography of early modern European social ideology, with her thesis edition of Antonio Enriquez Gomez’s Spanish Golden Age comedia, “A Critical Edition of Antonio Enriquez Gomez’s ‘A Lo que Obliga el Honor.’” This thesis reflected Wynter’s interest, from early on in her academic career, with excavating the historical and cultural genealogies that paralleled the colonization of the Americas and the making of the “New World” settler colonial project by western modernity’s imperial powers. Wynter’s thesis was praised by her colleagues and mentors “as being a scholarly work of real importance in a crucial and relatively unexplored field” (Chang 468). Her research interests as a student were foundational studies that would reappear in her writings, during the 1980s and 1990s, on the conquest of the New World and the founding of modern western humanism. Amid the burgeoning of revolutionary Pan-Africanist visions and manifestoes about the future of decolonization from across the Black Atlantic, Wynter’s interests in exploring the origins and contexts of late western modernity was perhaps of marginal interest to most anticolonial West Indian intellectual circles. As part of the early acts of substantial critical inquiry that Wynter would produce, this interest in approach would persist in subsequent decades of her intellectual life and work. Ultimately, this early scholarship was a critical precursor to her subsequent interests in literature, drama, and cultural criticism, areas of interest that distinguish Wynter’s critical and creative writings from the 1960s onward.

Wynter’s transnational movements

Wynter’s arrival in London in the late 1940s was part of the migration of a transatlantic community of workers, activists, scholars, and artists, who exchanged and debated ideas of decolonization and antiracist social transformation. This was a critical juncture in Afrodiasporic grassroots struggles that would carry into the 1960s and were key in the development of unprecedented revolutionary socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist Black/Third World political organizations throughout the western hemisphere. These foundational movements by colonized and structurally subjugated peoples in the metropoles of the West were nevertheless paralleled by growing insecurities among governments and ruling classes, who saw these cultures of grassroots activism and social criticism as threats to the hegemony of postwar white/European, liberal, capitalist society. The seismic shifts that occurred in the entire political, economic, social, and popular cultural contours of the Caribbean archipelago were critical to the radicalization of the political imaginations of Wynter and of anticolonial intellectuals throughout the Atlantic world.

In London, an international community of expatriates, exiles, and students from colonies in Africa, South Asia, and the Americas, created various intellectual circles that reflected on the structural and epistemological burdens of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized. A second generation of anticolonial Caribbean, West African, African American, and South Asian migrants expanded their view of what “decolonizing” political struggles meant in relation to the emerging post-independence, post-Civil Rights, neoliberal, neocolonial age. London was a critical transit point in the postwar Atlantic, in which Black artists, activists, writers, scholars, and laborers where suddenly in the front lines of building a postcolonial future.

Black internationalist consciousness along with the anticolonial nationalism among Caribbean migrant workers in London during the 1950s was a defining force in the cultivation of unprecedented cultures of critical social inquiry among writers, artists, academics, and public intellectuals, who would propel an important wave of self-identified “West Indian” art, literature, and scholarly research for the decades to come. It was in this context that Wynter began asking fundamental questions about the historical nature of the discourses by which modern societies produced and maintained order.

Although Wynter’s influence as an anticolonial writer and public intellectual was to truly begin only upon her return to the West Indies in 1961, and with the publication of her 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron, her life as a playwright for British radio and stage during the 1950s coincided with an extraordinary burst of literary and artistic productivity from exiled and migrant Caribbean writers like herself. She was, importantly, one among a first generation of self-identified “West Indian writers,” including Orlando Patterson, Merle Hodge, Beryl Gilroy, George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, Sam Selvon, and V. S. Naipaul, whose individual works shared in common an exploration of the lived experience of colonialism in both the colony and the metropole. Although Wynter has not been properly recognized as part of the early generation of West Indian artists of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), her activity as a playwright and cultural critic during the late 1950s and early 1960s demonstrate that she belongs to an early generation of “exile” West Indian artist–intellectuals in London who would set the stage for the founding of CAM by writers and artists like Kamau Brathwaite. Including Wynter in this early prehistory of CAM adds not only to the richness of the scholarly archive on this artistic movement but also to Wynter’s body of critical writings. Although not conventionally viewed as modes of critical intellectual labor, Wynter’s early activities as a student, actress, and writer for British radio and theater were undoubtedly influenced by and influential to the broader transatlantic geography of Caribbean decolonial culture, leading up to achievement of national independence in the region from the 1960s onward. This aspect of Wynter’s early intellectual life shores up some of the experiential archive that animates her later critiques of the humanities and its “disciplinary division of the study of the human.”

Wynter in the US academy

After accepting a lectureship to teach at the University of Michigan in 1971, Wynter arrived in the US in the midst of what appeared to be the successful institutionalization of the demands of student of color movements that coincided with the radically democratic and social justice-oriented visions of the early post-Civil Rights era. It was during this period of the early 1970s that Wynter “began to learn something of the complexity of the society of the United States itself” (Scott 173). But these times also marked the beginning of a new strategy of hegemony, which centered on the promotion of initiatives to represent American ethnic and cultural diversity within the managerial bureaucracies of the American state and ruling classes’ various political, economic, and social institutions. For Wynter and many other Black radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, decolonial political cultures in the post-independence West Indies and Black freedom struggles in the US represented a high point in modern world history.

As Wynter argues throughout her critical essays and lectures in the Caribbean and US during this period, these struggles were the basis for the emergence of a profound wave of social inquiry and intellectual questioning within the West, which would lead her to develop what Joyce King (2006) refers to as the “Black studies alterity perspective,” which served as the theoretical framework for much of her writings in the 1980s and 1990s (27). Spanning across the western and eastern shores of the US, as well as among college campuses and the offices of independent grassroots organizations, and across the various peripheral spaces of late 20th-century American empire, many radical Black and Ethnic studies advocates saw in their work the possibility of issuing new conceptions of human collective potential beyond the logics of capitalism, white supremacy, imperial nation-building, and antiBlack/antiNative governance and creating in its place what the Institute of the Black World referred to as “new concepts for a new man.”

At this juncture of her life as a critical intellectual, the Caribbean context would begin to appear less and less as her specific preoccupation, and more as a key instance of a larger problem within the geohistorical canvas of modernity. The decolonial perspective on western modernity that she established in the Caribbean in the 1960s would begin to take an important transcultural turn. Although Wynter left the Caribbean in 1971, her commitments to critical intellectual labor would persist in the US. They were most readily evident in the way that she approached her duties as a university professor. The Fanonist critique of modern, liberal professional, intellectual classes of early neocolonial modernity is a vein that runs strongly through her work as a scholar–activist, as a teacher, as a public lecturer and essayist. While anticolonial, political communities in the Caribbean emerged with new militancy in the early post-independence Caribbean, a parallel order of radical Black politica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: transnational F(r)ictions: the Word, the Gaze, and the Narrative
• Part I Agents of change and producers of knowledge
• Part II TransLocations and the futures of fiction
• Part III Diasporas of difference
• Index