Review Essay: The Underlife of the Dialectic: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoeisis and Epistemic Rupture

• Author: Bedour Alagraa
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221131032
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 279 –286

© The Author(s) 2022

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Book Review

Book Review

Abstract

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to

imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks

backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not

reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field

nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly

virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge

production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it,

reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to

late night conversations and confabulations.

The Underlife of the Dialectic: Sylvia Wynter on Autopoeisis and

Epistemic Rupture1

Reviewed by: Bedour Alagraa, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies,

University of Texas-Austin, Austin, TX, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221131032

1. Sylvia Wynter’s philosophy and political theory are most usually associated with

her many extraordinary essays (rather than a single text). This review will examine:

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2,

vol. 12, no. 3–vol. 13, no. 1 (1984): 19–70; “The Ceremony Found: Towards the

Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality

of (Self-)cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical

Epistemology, eds. Jason R. Ambroise, and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2015), 184–252; Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter,

“An Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness Another

Name,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); “On How We Mistook the Map for the

Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being,

of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in A Companion to African-

American Studies, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishers, 2006), 107–18; “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/

Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An

Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3 no. 3 (2003): 257–337; and

“Black Metamorphosis” (unpublished manuscript).

1131032PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221131032Political TheoryBook Review

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