The Artist-Philosopher

Abstract On the basis of an analysis of her unpublished manuscript Black Metamorphosis, the author, a nondisciplinary artist who attends to ritual aspects of aesthetics, argues that Sylvia Wynter never stopped being an artist. She is a language-centric artist with a functionalist aesthetic and a decolonial bent, and the manuscript indicates an interest in music, performance, and narrative (time-based mediums of worlding). The article examines certain lines of flight regarding sound and performance, as well as shades of an ontology of vital rhythm in her manuscript. Sometimes framed as a site of change regarding the status of Wynter (e.g., from artist to philosopher), the manuscript serves instead as a crucial indicator of the continuity of Wynter's creative inquiry regarding the narrative condition of being human, and her commitment for generating analytic tools and spaces for consecrating alternative narratives and transforming consciousness. After troubling the divide between orality and textuality that emerges when trying to situate the manuscript (as written or textual object) in relation to the oral and aural, the author elaborates on a notion from Tavia Nyong'o, that Black Metamorphosis is a fetish. That is, it embodies the properties of certain Black Atlantic ritual practices it analyzes: the work is a tool in the sacred maroon world-building process of rewriting the human, a performance script that, like all the best fetishes in Black American anthropologist J. Lorand Matory's analysis, is ambivalent.