Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron: Becoming the Posthuman through Polyrhythm, Madness, and God-Stories

Sylvia Wynter as one of the most outstanding postcolonial theorists claims to project the "rehumanization" of the colonized who are perceived as irrational others in all her literary career. This study aims to prove that Wynter's project of 'Rehumanization' is in line with the Posthuman plan in that they commonly visions a new human after both the Man 1 (rational man) and the Man 2 (biological man) denying the narrow concept of the western reason and expanding it into what has been deleted as irrationality such as feeling, intuition, and spirituality. It also argues that the literary devices that Wynter employs in The Hills of Hebron to implement her project of reinstating the human as concrete individuals are its native polyrhythm embodied in the textual surface which could overcome the Western epistemology by its fluidity, plurality, and becoming; its characters' madness as an extreme form of feeling, somewhere between unconsciousness and consciousness to overthrow the persistent Western reason; and the creation of new God stories as a substitution of Western Christianity which is the dominant myth justifying colonization. (Chungnam National University)