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“Unsettling Blues: A Decolonial Reading of the Blues Episteme” reads the phenomenon of American Blues with Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of Eurocentric ontology, “the doctrine of Man,” in its Christian and secular modes. In particular, the chapter uses Wynter’s insights to highlight the persistence of the blues episteme in the music of Mississippi born rap artist Justin Scott (also known as Big K.R.I.T.). By locating Scott within the decolonial legacy of the blues episteme, the chapter reveals an embodied and spatially situated example of how everyday people use knowledge and art to unsettle the doctrine that is “Man.” The chapter concludes that the blues episteme provides non-adaptive alternatives to the coloniality of certain African American Christian ontologies, which adapt to the Eurocentric doctrine of, “Man.” In all, the article suggests that “blues peoples,” those peoples that live out the blues episteme, produce cosmological and political options for being that prefigure and point towards decolonial visions of the human.

This chapter introduces readers to the struggle of decoloniality in relation to being—that is, in relation to how the human person is constructed in colonial modernity. It begins with outlining the way Sylvia Wynter has taken up this project and how essays in this volume engage Wynter’s work. It then turns to the function of religious cosmologies within projects of unsettling Man, while introducing essays in the volume that engage instances of how this project has been lived out in relation to religious cosmologies. Finally, it introduces the intersection between biopolitics and the project of unsettling Man in the service of introduction three essays that start from the effects of exclusion and oppression on concrete human bodies that have, through this oppressive logic, been reduced to bare flesh: bodies that are being deprived of a place in “the world”—that is, of meaning, of representation.

Sylvia Wynter’s work seeks to expose Man as an arbitrary conception inherently linked to racism and too often mistaken for the human as such. She also offers a more capacious model for being human—one that is culturally specific, relational and dynamic. This constructive dimension of her work is especially evident in her novel, The Hills of Hebron, for the literary genre is consonant with her argument that communities invent genres of being human from their local histories, the specificities of landscape, religious visions, and creative practices. This essay examines the contribution of the novel to Wynter’s broader project of deconstructing the doctrine of Man.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations in the postcolonial state and Caribbean intellectual production. It lays the groundwork for the discussion of the topic of the rescripting of indigeneity as a socio-discursive and politico-economic phenomenon. Two arguments seem to represent Creole belonging, both of which engaged regimes of labor that necessarily displace Indigenous Peoples: first in terms of not or no longer being African proposed by Sylvia Wynter, and second, in terms of a relationship to the New World that is an indigenous one, a notion by Richard Burton. It brings focus on how and where in the critical literature being and becoming Creole is elaborated as an indigenizing process.

Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.

The chapter treats a set of writers, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Gary Victor, and Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, whose fictions imagine experiences of migration and refuge in the wake of political and natural disaster. Their texts are meditations on the stakes of social and political institutions that support life in common in an age of ecological reckoning. The first part of the chapter returns to key questions of the Anthropocene, raised in the introduction, in order to demonstrate the ways that Caribbean thinkers have long anticipated scientific debates about the links between political violence and the future of the planet. Literary eco-archives contribute to these debates with stories about social worlds migrating and colliding. The chapter argues that Dalembert’s Ballade d’un amour inachevé, Victor’s Maudite éducation and its sequel L’Escalier de mes désillusions, and Pierre-Dahomey’s Rapatriés cast doubt on the future of a shared humanity with portraits of Haitian lives that foreground an ethics of vulnerability amidst widespread inequality. Through poetic representations of time and space, each writer ponders the ephemeral beauty of the present, always in flux between past and present, and each imagines the frailty of human lives in increasingly inhospitable climes.

Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present conception of what it is to be human.” That present conception is neoliberal humanism, which constructs the human in the image of a hyper-capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. Here, I turn toward a posthumanism that uses critical race and queer theories to find ways of being that are less violent to those who are black, queer, and feminine. What I’m interested in here is the kind of posthumanity that actively reconstructs what has long been a violently restrictive category: human.

This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms for the pursuit of post-secular critique, it argues that the salient distinction, under conditions of secularism, is not between religion and the non-religious but, more fundamentally, between good religion and bad belief; that this disciplinary distinction comes to be operationalized as a gendering, racializing biopolitics; and that we can best grasp secularism as the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism.

This chapter explores the anthropocentrism of African indigenous religions, with a focus on the religious traditions of the Yoruba peoples (south-west Nigeria). In doing so it hopes to disclose an alternative vision of the human to that of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man,” the figure at the heart of colonial modernity. While the humanistic orientation of African indigenous religion could be understood in a Feuerbachian sense, this chapter argues that such an approach fails to address the Eurocentric assumptions in Feuerbach’s anthropological analysis of religion. Drawing on ritual studies and recent efforts to rehabilitate the idea of “animism,” the chapter goes on to sketch what it calls an “animist humanism.” The aim here is to articulate a religious anthropocentrism that indicates how thinking with African indigenous religions might enable us to think beyond the doctrine of Man.