We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonising Essays 1967-1984 - Paperback

by Sylvia Wynter (Author)

The essays and articles collected here set out to decolonise the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order of Western Europe. The wide-ranging contributions include literary and critical reviews, an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, an analysis of Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and a pioneering examination of the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history via the life and work of Bernardo de Balbuena (1562-1627), epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica. Indeed, in the vein of James, a crucial imperative of Wynter's work has been to reconceptualise the history of the Caribbean as central to the formation not only of the New World Americas but also of the modern world system. Here, her original analyses are not forged from the hegemonic European perspective, but rather more inclusively always take into account the "gaze from below" of the indigenous (indio) and the slave/ex-slave Black (negro), who constitute "the underside of modernity".

Author Biography

Sylvia Wynter is a professor emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University, the author of a series of critical articles published in Jamaica Journal, New World Quarterly, and Savacou, and an active participant in the BBC Caribbean Voices radio program. She is the author of The Hills of Hebron. She lives in Oakland, California.