Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities. And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.
—Sylvia Wynter
Sylvia Wynter has lived a decolonial life. Her writings, artistic works, and pedagogical interventions, from the very beginning, have sought a way out of the existing “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom” that has done incalculable violence to human life and the earth that holds it. Her theorization of the human as a plurality of self-inventing forms of life (“genres of being human”) is a celebration of the beauty of human beings and their capacity to animate hope and desire through the always unfinished work of invention.
“The rule is love,” Wynter tells us in her play Maskarade, and it is this rule that has guided her unflinching confrontation of Western modernity’s pernicious “monohumanist” story of what it means to be a human being.
As Wynter has shown throughout her decades-long writing career, it is “Man,” the Euro-Christian West’s racialized figure of human being first grounded in the early modern rational subject of the European colonial state (“Man1”), and later the “biocentric” subject of the natural and social sciences (“Man2”), that has defined our shared global existence in the contemporary world around the lie that its particular form of life represents the normative metric for all humanity.
As Wynter continuously exposes in drawing from the deep well of Caribbean and global anticolonial thought and praxis that is the foundation of her intellectual and political formation, Man’s lie has been unable to contain the spirit of resistance and invention that manifests in human solidarity across the earth. It is from the examples of anticolonial movements in global modernity—ranging from slave revolts to pan-Africanism to the American Indian Movement and beyond, as well as the Fanonian imperative to “take the leap” out of Man’s order of knowledge—that a global human future remains open to new possibilities. In her unique ability to see this opening, as humanity writ large now struggles to conceive a future beyond the devastating effects of climate instability, economic inequality, and political stalemates that mark the exhaustion of Man’s overdetermination in the twenty-first century, Wynter has given us an invaluable gift.
Wynter is not a religious studies scholar. Although religion plays a significant role in her thinking, it is important to understand that it is not the primary object of her study. However, as she approaches the category of religion through her intensely interdisciplinary set of intellectual resources, some very interesting insights emerge.
First, Wynter’s essays underscore the intimate relationship between race and religion. Her expansive take on the origin of the Du Boisian “color line”—which takes us back to medieval Europe and the modes of categorization and distinction that were central to Christian scholasticism—contributes important insights to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the extent to which modern racial categories are grounded in, or shaped by, Christian theological thinking.
In “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003)—which remains her best-known and most often cited essay—she writes,
“Race” was therefore to be, in effect, the nonsupernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing West would now give to the Heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are.
With her notion of “extrahuman,” Wynter helps us understand that even if race is a cultural construct, a human invention, and an ideology, it works like a religious/theological discourse in that it claims authority outside of the human. She observes, in other words, the persistence of a particular structure of thinking.
Second, Wynter’s consistent problematizing of knowledge production and disciplinary formation (a point to which we briefly return below) offers new ways to study how colonialism and coloniality shape(d) the study of religion. This claim resonates with Charles Long’s 1986 groundbreaking decolonial essay collection Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. That book demonstrated that the modern academic study of religion finds its origin in colonialism, whose many afterlives still reverberate in the concepts we use, frameworks we develop, and methods we embrace. More recent studies often emphasize the conceptual entanglement of race and religion—“conjoined twins,” in Theodore Vial’s quip—and pay more attention to the role and importance of whiteness in establishing and maintaining hegemonic thought and funding patterns.
Third, Wynter helps us place the category of the human at the forefront of our inquiry. Of course, many in the study of religion work with the assumption that religion is, as Jonathan Z. Smith would have it, an “inextricably human phenomenon.” Smith’s phrasing here seems to suggest that “human” is self-explanatory and self-evident. Wynter’s writings on the universalization of Man help us understand that, although the “human” is often mobilized as a universal and general category, such unifying tendencies are constituted by a hierarchy of humanness. Race, gender, and other markers of difference overdetermined some people as “fully” human and others as “not-quite-human” or even “non-human.”
The study of religion has often obscured these histories of violence, which is remarkable when we consider that “religion” was a category that was often used as a kind of “test for humanness,” to use Paul Christopher Johnson’s apt description. In the colonial context, whether one had an authentic religion (and if so, what kind) was a question that played an integral role in determining the (not-quite-)human nature of the colonized. Both “human” and “religion” have worked as exclusionary categories, that, often in tandem, were used to exclude or selectively include groups of people.
In the history of the study of religion, then, perceptions of the human did not begin as the ostensibly universal category that scholars in the field often seem to assume it is. This is precisely the problem Wynter helps the field address, if in a much broader sense: the study of the nature and origins of the “color line” exposes how received notions of the human, grounded in Western conceptions of religion, are essential to the production and reproduction of the racial order of colonial modernity.
Yet, there are also elements in Wynter’s work that make it less immediately available to scholars of religion. For instance, although religion shows up consistently throughout Wynter’s oeuvre, it is also an understated and somewhat undertheorized category of analysis. At moments, she seems to use “religion” to name and identify a universal human social function that revolves around the production of “extrahuman agents of determination.” A superficial or cursory reading of this argument may lead scholars of religion to conclude that Wynter seems to fall into the trap of universalization that scholars in the field of religious studies have tried to get away from since the 1990s (if not earlier). As we understand the danger and risk of such universalizing narratives, we hope that this book complicates, nuances, and problematizes this conclusion.
At other times, Wynter seems to equate “religion” with culture more generally, or with mythmaking. Given that “mythos” is such a central term in her oeuvre, this may have led scholars to think that the category carries less importance. And yet, at other times, it seems that her main concern is not with religion as such but with Christianity and its later secularized formations in the so-called West, a concern that in many ways mirrors the claims of those who maintain that “religion” is a category tainted by its Christian bias.
If the category of religion itself is hard to pin down in Wynter’s writing, then so are her scattered reflections about the potential for liberation through forms of religiosity. In some of her essays, she celebrates the survival and transformation of African forms of religiosity in the Americas and the liberative possibilities of Rastafari thought. Other Wynter essays gesture toward a “demonic piety,” a wild and heretical notion of the sacred that exceeds Man’s epistemic grasp. Yet, despite these positive references to religion we might say that, to the extent that the secular and religious are co-constitutive, Wynter ultimately seeks to move beyond both.
One more reason why religion is difficult to parse out in Wynter’s writing is simply the sprawling transdisciplinary nature of her work. In order to break and transcend disciplinary boundaries, and the divide between the natural and the human sciences, Wynter draws from and builds on a select if ever-expanding group of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and fields whom she puts in generative conversation with each other: Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edouard Glissant, and Frantz Fanon return frequently, as do Michel Foucault, Hans Blumenberg, V. Y. Mudimbe, Aníbal Quijano, Anthony Pagden, Jacques Le Goff, Bruno Latour, and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
Wynter’s writings, as Walter Mignolo writes, exist in “a network, wherein her ideas and writings are in conversation with and refer back (and forth) to one another.” Understanding how this network emerges and works requires tracing how the same scholars show up again and again. When it comes to religion, she often draws from N. J. Girardot, Alex Comfort, Antonio T. de Nicolás, and Maurice Godelier. That these are not scholars frequently cited in contemporary scholarship may have also contributed to the somewhat delayed engagement with Wynter in religious studies.
Even if the field of religious studies typically welcomes and engages a range of approaches and methodologies, it has been slow to pick up scholarship in Black studies more generally (which relates back to its more general historical lack of interest in exploring race), even if that is currently, and fortunately, changing.
With our book Words Made Flesh, we intend to place Wynter on the map as an important—indeed, necessary—thinker for scholars of religion and the expansive field of religious studies. In doing so, however, we risk reifying the disciplinary binaries and boundaries that her “science of the word”—and, indeed, Black study more generally—seeks to problematize. To follow Wynter is to enter the “heretical” territory of interhuman knowledge that exceeds any disciplinary claim of capturing the truth of our existence. She invites us to look beyond our narrow categories, classification systems, and ingrained habits of thinking, and out toward a new horizon of knowledge where the scientist and the poet, the organizer and the artist, the philosopher and the priest all come together to study what it would mean to create a new mode of human existence that serves not just a single vision of human life, but the totality of life found across our shared existence.
Following Wynter, the first task of moving beyond the stifling boundaries of disciplinarity is to recognize just how much we (professional scholars) are stuck in its protocols. While our book does not pretend to have transcended the academic discipline of “religious studies,” we hope that it represents, in its own small way, a movement toward the dismantling of some of the field’s conceptual borders that keep it safely within the confines of Man’s order of knowledge. If there is a future for religious studies that does not succumb to the suffocating fear and despair of Man2’s biocentric trajectory of neoliberal austerity, knowledge commodification, and antihumanity, it will be one that has dared to join the ranks of those who have long known that, as Césaire put it, “there still remains one sea to cross / oh still one sea to cross / that I may invent my lungs.”
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This blog post is excerpted from the introduction to Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion (Fordham University Press, 2025). Blog posts based on the book’s chapters will follow, once a week, for the next few weeks.
