Unsettling the Question of Technology

This editors’ introduction to the special issue “Sylvia Wynter and the Question of Technology” situates Wynter's revolutionary critique of the “overrepresentation of Man” within the intertwined crises of race, technics, and planetary survival. Reading Wynter alongside current formations of artificial intelligence, ecological collapse, and technofascism, the editors find that her concept of “dysselection” exposes how racial capitalism's epistemologies persist through technological systems that automate dehumanization. The editors frame Wynter as a theorist of technogenesis and a precursor to feminist science and technology studies, whose thought unsettles Heideggerian and humanist assumptions about technology. Revisiting her Stanford years, her dialogue with Frantz Fanon, and her unpublished Black Metamorphosis, the issue reconsiders Wynter's redefinition of the human as praxis rather than category. Bringing her into conversation with Donna Haraway, Ruha Benjamin, and Simone Browne, this issue calls for a renewed “science of the word” capable of reenchanting the human and reimagining technology as a site of struggle, invention, and decolonial possibility.