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June 14th and 15th will be remembered as an important milestone in the development of the bourgeoning field of Africana Thought. Those two days at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica were devoted to a conference on the work of Sylvia Wynter entitled, "After Man, Towards the Human: The Thought of Sylvia Wynter." Wynter is a Jamaican novelist (The Hills of Hebron), playwright, critic, and author of a series of path-breaking essays on the human subject and social transformation, some of which are being collected in a volume for publication. Until her recent retirement, she had been a professor of Afro-American Studies and of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Stanford University, and also served as department chair in Afro-American Studies. At the present moment, the best available introduction to Wynter's thinking is the extensive and in-depth interview she gave to Professor David Scott of Columbia University in the September, 2000 issue of Small Axe.
Jointly sponsored by the Center for Caribbean Thought at UWI and the department of Africana Studies at Brown, the conference was opened by Rex Nettleford, UWI's Vice Chancellor, who announced that on November 2002, he would be conferring an honorary doctorate on Professor Wynter. The participants in this conference came from both the Caribbean and the U.S., and included several of Professor Wynter's former students at Stanford. Presenting papers that surely made her feel proud were Demetrius Eudell (now an Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University), Jason Glenn, and Jason Ambroise (graduate students at Harvard and Berkeley respectively). Other notable figures...