GCSC Keynote Lectures: Aaron Kamugisha: Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis and the Emergence of African Diaspora Studies in the Caribbean

Aaron Kamugisha: Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis and the Emergence of African Diaspora Studies in the Caribbean

In his lecture, Aaron Kamugisha discusses the path-breaking importance of Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, an unpublished 900-page manuscript written by her in the 1970s. Black Metamorphosis is a remarkable manuscript, and deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the most important unpublished non-fiction work by an Anglophone Caribbean intellectual, and the major guide to the transition in Wynter’s thought between her work mainly on the Caribbean and Black America in the 1960s and 1970s, and her theory of the human from the early 1980s onwards. A close study of Black Metamorphosis also reveals that it is a crucial text for comprehending the emergence of African diaspora studies in the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean, and is in fact the most sustained, and compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere ever written by a Caribbean intellectual.

//Aaron Kamugisha

Programme Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies  at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus.