Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and Curriculum Studies

The work of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter has become central to conversations across the humanities and social sciences, where her attention to historically shifting understandings of the human has become enormously influential in Black studies, gender studies, posthumanism, and conversations about decolonization. At the core of her account of the human are two claims with far-reaching consequences: the human should be thought of less as a noun than as a verb―not something we are but something we do―and the currently dominant understanding of the human, which she calls ‘Man,’ emerges only in the crucible of colonialist violence and Enlightenment knowledge production.

This volume is the first collection of essays to survey Wynter's decades-long work in relation to conversations in curriculum studies, childhood studies, teacher education, and critical theories of education. With contributions from both leading scholars in the field and emergent voices, these essays demonstrate how Wynter's rethinking of the human can reshape our understanding of education. Contributors explore the coloniality of academic writing, neocolonial ‘mind snatching,’ Black-Indigenism, teacher education, Ontario's public schooling curriculum, secondary school English literacies, and futures of curriculum studies.

These essays unsettle dominant beliefs about education as a humanizing practice, and they point toward a decolonial future for education after Man. Offering highly readable entry points into Wynter's vast and challenging oeuvre, this collection is essential reading for scholars and students seeking to reimagine education toward a future beyond dehumanization.

The essays in this book were first published in the journal Curriculum Inquiry.

Nathan Snaza is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Richmond, USA. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (2019) and Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (2024).

Aparna Mishra Tarc is Associate Professor of Culture, Language and Teaching at the Faculty of Education at York University, Canada. She is the author of Literacy of the Other: Renarrating Humanity (2015) and Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee (Routledge, 2020).