The authoritarian United States government is supporting and expanding military assistance to the genocide in Gaza; banning books on race, gender, and sexuality; suspending habeas corpus; detaining and deporting families regardless of documentation; militarizing civilian spaces; abolishing academic freedom and freedom of speech; defunding climate research and response; gutting institutions of public health; defunding public institutions that have diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and implementing hateful policies that target groups based on religion, ability, race, gender, nationality, immigration status, and other markers of difference.
Inspired by Black socio-spiritual movements of the early to mid-20th century, like the Rastafari movement, Sylvia Wynter’s work allows us to interrogate how we arrived at this moment and where we go from here.
Who is the human? How does the human species work together across difference? How have the global Black and Brown majority defined the human? These are core questions guiding Sylvia Wynter’s work, and they can only be answered through interrogating how we know what we know.
The academic study of religion emerged from the bowels of racial-hereditary slavery and colonialism, although many students only study its emergence in the context of nineteenth-century western Europe. Yet the western European academy was entangled with transatlantic slavery and imperial expansion, which provided it with tacit and overt epistemological underpinnings.
According to Wynter, western epistemology supported an account of the human that was imposed on a global scale through colonialism. A generic “Man” is represented as white, European, Christian, upper-class, property-owning, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and male, with women and children dependents. Everyone else exists in a liminal space or “space of otherness.” In this way, religion intertwines with the formation of Man and his others.
Inspired by critiques of the prevailing order made by the Rastafari movement, Wynter’s creative corpus centers the ways liminal counter-worlds innovate strategies that undue logics of western epistemology and invent new notions of the human that are not rooted in domination.
Wynter leans into Ethiopian anthropologist Asmarom Legesse’s notion of the liminal, describing it as the category “that embodies the deviant Other to the normal identity of the society.” She quotes Legesse as emphasizing that the “liminal person is not irrelevant to the structured community surrounding him.” Indeed, the liminal person is society’s “conceptual antithesis;” it is “by reference to him that the structured community defines and understands itself.” Legesse defines the liminal as the antithetical space against which the prevailing order defines itself. This antithetical space calls into question the status quo and situates the space of the liminal as “the repository of the creative potential underlying human society.”
People emerging from liminal spaces can use their subjectivity to excavate colonial rationality and create counter-worlds of existence. Frantz Fanon did this by charting a “third way” to explore the contours of humanity. He developed the concept of sociogeny to denote the way human beings form a sense of self in community with others. Wynter argues that sociogeny, or what she terms the “sociogenic principle,” is the foundation for the multiplicity of “genres of being human” that have existed historically. Essentially, she argues that there is no single way to be human and that there is danger in a single overrepresented narrative of humanity. Single narratives of humanity construct mythologies that become part of the colonizer’s identity so that their sense of self necessitates having a human other.
Pan-African anticolonial socio-spiritual movements, like Rastafari, emerge from counter-worlds of liminality that provide ways of charting a future outside the realms of white supremacist reason. Rooted in the philosophies emerging from these liminal counter-worlds, Sylvia Wynter’s literary imagination explores the contours of ontological sovereignty.
Ontological sovereignty is different from prevailing notions of economic and political sovereignty rejects European, Christian understandings of humanity and epistemology. According to Wynter, “To speak the conception of ontological sovereignty, we would have to move completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human, and therefore outside the ground of the orthodox body of knowledge which institutes and reproduces such a conception.”
According to Wynter, Rastafari philosophy provides a way to live as ontologically sovereign. Rastafari is a Pan-African socio-spiritual movement that was created by Black people in the 1930s to center Africa and affirm Black dignity and divinity in colonial Jamaica. Locating divinity in Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen Asfaw, Rastafari created Black gods in human form and embodied those gods and goddesses through the concept of InI, which means becoming one with the divine. The idea of Black people becoming divine challenged whiteness-as-religion and planted the seeds for new ways of being and knowing. As Wynter notes, Rastafari “is transforming symbols, it is re-semanticizing them.” She continues, “radicalism begins to take on a Rastafarian face.”
Wynter concludes that Rastafari created a “heresy of humanism” or an “underground cultural experience” where “the blacks reinvented themselves as a We that needed no Other to constitute their Being.” Rejecting their alterity and engaging in the process of self-invention, Rastafari livity (lived philosophy) created counter-symbolic orders of “nonadaptive mode[s] of human self-cognition” that attempt to “fully realize … autonomy of feelings, thoughts, [and] behaviors.”
My own research follows Wynter, leaning into her theorizations as a navigational compass for thinking through what it takes to live as ontologically sovereign in an authoritarian state. The Rastafari movement represents an experiment in this process. The audacity it took for colonized Black people in the 1930s to proclaim their freedom, denounce the British monarchy, and build autonomous Black communities in the mountains of Pinnacle, Jamaica was momentous. The work of autonomous Rastafari world-makers is instructive for continuing to think about what ontological sovereignty is, how it can be achieved, and the type of resilience, risk, and endurance it takes to ensure the survival of our human species and our planetary home in the face of authoritarian governance.
