Rewriting/recurricularlizing as a matter of life and death: The coloniality of academic writing and the challenge of black mattering therein

Within our current order of knowledge, propagated by the Humanities and Social Sciences, the mattering of Black lives is all but inconceivable. The only possibility for challenging this inconceivability, asserts Sylvia Wynter, is to rewrite our current order of knowledge such that it refuses the overrepresentation of European man and opens to multiple co-existential and relational modes of humans being. While the call to rewrite is a call to rethink, reimagine, re-curricularize knowledge processes, it should also compel a reconsideration of the act of academic writing, as a key site where Black and other disenfranchised people are rendered less than human or not human at all. And as such it is also the site, upon which Black and other disenfranchised people have historically intervened “cutting and augmenting” meaning with sound to announce the presence of Black/Human and to bring forth new insights toward the project of rewriting the current order of knowledge in the interests of a multiple/co-existential rendering of humans being.