The madness, Sylvia Wynter and a body politics of anti-colonialism
Greg Thomas
“For these categories had not existed before the West’s global expansion and its forcible incorporation into the peoples and cultures it met up with into its own now secularizing Judeo-Christian cultural field….”
– Sylvia Wynter (2000)
An animated short “film” focused on Sylvia Wynter was posted to Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel in early 2025. The descriptive blurbs notes, “Sylvia Wynter was a radical philosopher from the Caribbean who explored modern history from the perspective of slavery, the Middle passage and plantation economics.”1 Whatever its origins, I was loath to take a look for a couple of reasons. The name of Wynter has recently become a “cottage industry” (to quote her former student Demetrius Eudell) for too many academics who come to her work looking for another commercial-academic trend, typically with much intellectual or political understanding. What’s more, the YouTube introduction immediately placed her life in the past tense; and I had noticed in horror something similar had been done to Fatma Bernawi, the great African Palestinian legend, long before her actual transition in 2022, probably when her fellow rebel sister Ehsan Bernawi had passed on seven years before her.
In any case, I had just recalled Wynter’s words in NAQD, which is a bilingual journal of social critique based in Algeria, in its special issue contending with the genocide in Gaza:
“One thing that has stood out for me in Gaza, oppositionally speaking, is a Palestinian objection to the “women and children” discourse of sympathy.2 That familiar calculation of loss and suffering has been forcefully exposed as a racist and dehumanizing blockade of peoplehood and its unconditional freedoms. That familiar refrain exploits gender and minor status to reify racist empire, hierarchy and white middle-class gender under the guise of compassion and concern. From Gaza, by contrast, there has been an absolute insistence on a whole peoplehood of “men, women and children” (so to speak) – all – without sacrifice for liberal humanist recognition. This was the point of Toni Cade Bambara’s anti-gender as well as “anti-sexist” promotion of “Blackhood” in her often-misappropriated polemic on the matter, “On the Issue of Roles” (1970). This intervention similarly evokes Fanon’s own celebration of embattled resistance in “The Algerian Family,” the third chapter of L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959)….”
My own argument in The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and the Erotic Schemes of Empire (2007) has addressed the racist “rape” discourse of Zionism well in advance of today’s specific, manic reiteration of it.3 Fanon’s attention to this “sign” resonates across Sylvia Wynter’s immense body of work. Much inspired by him, she has unsettled the enshrined paradigms of “human rights,” Marxism (like all economism), and feminism as much as liberalism, proper, daring to dethrone them each in her heretical ideological critique. All extant gender and sexuality conceits and categories (including the gay or Queer Theoretical ones, too, which can casually justify genocidal bombing of “homophobic” Muslim states but never homophobic European or North American countries, which historically colonise and neo-colonise other populations with their most powerful homophobia and heterosexism violently in tow) function as modern imperial entities for Western bourgeois humanism, no matter who espouses them on any individual level. The pointed demystification of “women and children” discourse under genocidal conditions in Gaza is a moment not to be missed for all colonized peoples or populations in the far-reaching politics of discourse, ideas, representation, ideological warfare as well as what is typically called, art, media, culture, etc.4 The sexual politics and propaganda of Zionism deploy out of a wider history of racialized sexuality and colonizing sexual violence which animate the history of European imperialism for centuries.
Toni Cade Bambara inspired me to write The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power; it can even be read as a footnote to her polemic, “On the Issue of Roles.”5 I was thrilled to find her outside of any classroom, I believe, in my sophomore year of college. This first book grew out of my dissertation work, whose title was a little different: “The Sexual Demon of White Power.” I always wanted this to be the title of the book, but as I often say, “White Power said, ‘No!’” The academic publishing industry thought the “colonial” was safer, more profitable and more respectable language than “white-supremacy,” or slavery, if only because the rhetorical gaming of “post-coloniality” could make it so in the preceding decades.
After an intervention into an “erotics of Aryanism” animating the historicity of empire; the plantation complex of gender “construction” in the Americas; and the endemic comprador propagation of white Western body politics by colonial “middle-class” elites, worldwide, I concluded by expanding upon an introductory point that should have been a basic one in theory. To raise the subject or a critique of gender or sexuality hardly means that your discourse is “radical” or “progressive” itself. The final chapter of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power is therefore “Neo-Colonial Canons of Gender and Sexuality” (“After COINTELPRO”). Its subtitle refers to “Counter-Insurgent Critiques of Sexism and Homophobia,” which could be “gay” or “straight” as well as “patriarchal” or feminist” in due course. This intervention was made against the institutionalisation of “multiculturalism” – or overtly and covertly liberal critiques of “race, gender, class, and sexuality” in North America.
What obtains nowadays is what could be easily called reactionary gender fundamentalism. Taking center stage in the wake of former sex-radical possibilities is not just identity politics, but a virtual commercialised parody of it. An absurd departure from what the Combahee River Collective had referred to as politics of identity, today’s so-called “identity politics’ is a highly selective identity politics; petit-bourgeois liberal and neoliberal politics of identity; indeed, a liberal identity narcissism broadcast across the mainstream. The very idea of anti-colonialist body politics as part of a comprehensive revolutionary politics of liberation is where now – all these decades into an age of counter-revolution – and what other than something to be forgotten or repressed?
The madness of masculinity and femininity
When Bambara first began work on The Black Woman: An Anthology, it was envisioned as a movement collection with organized militants as its primary contributors. Her “On the Issue of Roles” dared to put the collection’s title under critical erasure. The aim was to interrogate and dispense with gender itself. She attacked the “madness of masculinity and femininity” – both, alike. Neither manhood nor womanhood was safe as she championed the need to define “Blackhood,” instead, without presuming the mandatory character of compulsory sex or gender categorisation as part and parcel of the white capitalist culture of the West and its false universalisations. Her explicitly avowed goal was not gender and sexuality studies (or even Black, let alone “African-American” studies) but revolution, simple and plain – revolution on all fronts, inside and out, from the present to the future. Still, when Bambara or this anthology is invoked in academia, this Bambara is filtered out along with her political hostility toward orthodoxies more fully ensconced elsewhere in the Establishment.
I would engage that Bambara again when I wrote “The ‘S’ Word” for After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter, some years later.6 There had then been a rhetoric of “de-naturalisation” somewhat in vogue with the popularity of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in particular. But, I insist, this reputed de-naturalisation of sex, gender and sexuality always failed insofar as all white, European and Euro-North American scholarship instinctively re-naturalised it by naturalizing, universalising and normalising Western history and its history of human embodiment or body politics in virtually every way imaginable. (This is how the vogue of so-called “queerness” also continues the recycling of Occidentalism and whiteness as global norms of human being itself, as one of Gloria Anzaldua’s least known essays should have effectively exposed back in 1991: “To(o) Queer the Writer – Loca, Escritora y Chicana.”)7 My aim in “The ‘S’ Word” was to reconstruct and promulgate a Black radical tradition of work that not only, truly de-naturalises – and de-universalises – the normative categories and conceits of sex, gender and sexuality, but de-naturalises them as specifically racist-imperialist categories of empire, without a doubt. This effort began and ended with Wynter, strategically, if it has gotten increasingly unthinkable over time as much as academic commerce has successfully hegemonised such discourses in the 21st century.
I don’t think I knew much of Kuwasi Balagoon at the time. I definitely did not know that Sun Ra that had boomed, “No such thing as a man and a woman. That’s over now. Everybody on this planet is a god,” vibrating with Bambara in his own fashion. Cosmology is no less vital here than ideology. I did know and explore how new continental African discourses on gender could critique feminism as another patriarchal discourse of the white West. My point was to provoke, preserve and promote what poet Cheryl Clarke would critically reclaim as Black “militant” and “revolutionary” “sexual literacies” crafted in struggle by “Africans in North America,” not to mention elsewhere in the Global African world.8
Elsewhere, I reviewed much of Wynter’s body of work from the vantage point of the body politics of “Man,” Western bourgeois humanism.9 She had long exposed liberalism, Marxism and feminism as “sub/versions” of the same old “Man,” more or less. While I have added “Queer Theory” to this list of characters, she was not embraced like so-called “New French Feminism(s)” when she refused feminism as humanism but – unlike them – in a capacious anti-imperialist framework of critique. She was attacked. Yet, nowadays, she can be falsely claimed as “feminist” or a “Black feminist” icon herself by another generation of academics who do not actually know her work or just blithely refuse it in a crude, grotesque – and essentially “biocentric” – Western bourgeois humanist misappropriation. She has long meant to take us “Beyond” the discursive paradigms and institutions to which her detractors and misappropriators cling without any willingness to imagine her “After.” Hence, any serious review of her work would revisit her thinking on the totality of the negation of “population groups” by this imperialist regime of “Man” so that we are cast as “Human Others,” “Defective Humans,” “Subhuman Others,” etc., whose bodies could not possibly “body” correctly for human gender, human sexuality or human civilization. Of necessity, she shifts received gender and sexual discourses from the genital individualist level to this larger political and historical plane of Modern Empire that entails a coloniality of sexism, gender, and heterosexism, so to speak – which includes all the “sub/versions” of “Man” – the very madness requiring Bambara’s revolution.
Discussing her own work, Bambara once wrote, “Salvation Is the issue” – and, for Wynter, this issue was one she once dubbed “ontological sovereignty” in Small Axe.10
To launch a new blog entitled “Discourse on Anti-Colonialism” is surely to call upon Aimé Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism publication would gain great visibility in the anglophone world. Surely, we should remark here that the oft-quoted passage of that text on fascism and Nazism is aging far too well still in the ongoing history of Western colonial imperialism. Robin Kelley’s introduction to the latest edition of this book situated Césaire’s comments in a greater Pan-African genealogy. Perhaps no other figure would come later to advance it and advance it more boldly than George L. Jackson in Blood in My Eye. But it seems basic to the West and the settler colonial and slaveocratic entity that is the United States of America to refuse Black anti-fascist critique outright – to deny it and denegate it out of all serious consideration in “civil discourse” as such. How is that not a fascist operation itself?
When Sylvia Wynter identified Western “Ethno-Class” Man or Western bourgeois humanism as “mono-humanism,” namely, a pseudo-humanism which cannot admit any other humanism to exist or rival it by any stretch, this too is the fascism of this “Man,” this humanism.” Césaire famously decried it as a “humanism made to the measure” of the West rather than the world. The matters of fascism and sex or sexuality were fundamentally inseparable in Wilhem Reich’s classic book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, besides his commitment to organized sex-radical movements as well as socio-political considerations of matriarchy. The fact that no real antithesis to orthodox paradigms of body politics is admitted today must be a core element of Western colonialist fascism too. A counter to the discourse of “women and children” erupted around Gaza/Palestine as a moment of friction against this very system; and, quiet as it’s kept, it communes with key, historic and heretical elements of our discourses on colonialism which are systematically ignored only in the service of colonialism and its raging – homicidal, suicidal, and genocidal persistence.
Greg Thomas teaches Black Studies as professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He is the author of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power (2007) and curator of George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine, a travelling art exhibition on the radical kinship between Palestinians and Black Americans.
‘Sylvia Wynter: Beyond man’, Al Jazeera English, 9 February 2025:
For one riff on the matter, see:
Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Indiana University Press, 2007).
Greg Thomas, “This passionate research”: George Jackson, Gaza and exhibition afterlife.” NAQD, 2024/2 Hors-série 8, 2024. p.144a-164a.
Toni Cade Bambara, "On the Issue of Roles," in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: Mentor, 1970), 123-135.
Greg Thomas, “The ‘S’ Word: Sex, Empire & Black Radical Tradition (After Sylvia),” in After Man, Toward the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter, eds. Anthony Bogues and Brian Meeks (Kingston, JA: Ian Randle Press, 2005), 76-99.
Gloria Anzaldua, "To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, Escritora y Chicana," in Inversions: Writings by Dykes, Queers, and Lesbians, ed. Betsy Warland (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1991), 249-263.
Cheryl Clarke, “After Mecca”: Women Poets of the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
Greg Thomas, “The Body Politics of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ in an ‘Anti-Black’ World: Sylvia Wynter on Humanism’s Empire (A Critical Resource Guide),” in Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Anti-Blackness, eds. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2015), 67-107.
David Scott, "The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter," Small Axe 8 (September 2000), 136.