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Abstract: Taking the resurgence of critical interest in Sylvia Wynter within contemporary Black cultural theory as its starting point, this essay has two aims: to examine more closely how Wynter has been received recently within Black studies, and to then historicize that critical reception by thinking about how it relates to earlier work (the 1960s–1980s) when Wynter was beginning to develop her own protocols for a critical decolonial and aesthetic theory. Wynter's work on temporality, the cognitive subject, and theories of reading will be the main concern. Although the essay's primary archive is the long arc of Wynter's work and how those interventions have affected some recent turns within Black cultural theory, the piece will also aim to examine more closely the effects of Wynter's interventions through reviewing a number of recent monographs within the theoretical humanities (David Marriott's Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being , Tavia Nyong'o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life , Catherine Malabou's Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality , and Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science: and other Stories ) that, when read together, help to describe more clearly the contemporary epistemic atmosphere within which so many new and pathfinding readings of Wynter have been taking place.
Michael Washington (Sat,) studied this question.