Sylvia Wynter papers, 1950s-2018

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This collection is currently undergoing processing. The Academia series, Events and Engagement series, and Research Materials series are unavailable until approximately June 2026.

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This collection is currently undergoing processing. The Academia series, Events and Engagement series, and Research Materials series are unavailable until approximately June 2026. Access note....
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Summary

Creator:
Wynter, Sylvia, Eudell, Demetrius Lynn, King, Joyce Elaine, 1947-, Bogues, Anthony, and John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture
Abstract:
Sylvia Wynter (1928- ) is a Jamaican writer, scholar, thinker, and teacher. As a writer, she wrote plays for radio and the stage, as well as a novel. As a professor, she taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica; the University of Michigan; the University of California, San Diego; and Stanford University. She has also published numerous essays on many topics from Jamaican history to literary criticism to exploring what it means to be human. The Sylvia Wynter papers contain Wynter's written works from the 1950s through 2018; professional correspondence to and from Wynter from the 1970s through the 2010s; teaching and administrative materials from her time at Stanford University, the University of California at San Diego, and other institutions; materials related to Wynter's participation in conferences, speaking engagements, guest lectures, and other events; and Wynter's reading and research materials.
Extent:
435 Linear Feet
Language:
Materials in English, Spanish, and French.
Collection ID:
RL.11949

Background

Scope and content:

The Sylvia Wynter Papers contain Wynter's written works from the 1950s through 2018; professional correspondence to and from Wynter from the 1970s through the 2010s; teaching and administrative materials from her time at Stanford University, the University of California at San Diego, and other institutions; materials related to Wynter's participation in conferences, speaking engagements, guest lectures, and other events; and Wynter's reading and research materials. Included are materials related to the writing and editing of "New Seville: the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de las Casas", 1865: A Ballad for a Rebellion, "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture", "Jonkonnu in Jamaica", "The Ceremony Must Be Found", Do Not Call Us Negroes: How 'Multicultural' Textbooks Perpetuate Racism, "After Man, Its Last Word", "The Ceremony Found", "Human Being as Noun?", and many other titles. Also included are extensive class lecture notes, syllabi, course reading lists, reports, memorandums, and other materials related to Wynter's decades of teaching and term as Chair of the African and African American Studies Department at Stanford University.

The collection is arranged into five series: Writings, Academia, Correspondence, Events and Engagement, and Research Materials. When first received by the Rubenstein Library, materials from all series were mixed together, and many were unlabeled. Wynter used and revisited the same materials for multiple projects, including for lectures, seminars, regular courses, talks, and published essays, and so there is considerable overlap between series and subseries.

The Writings series is the largest series in the collection. It includes handwritten and typescript drafts, often marked or edited, as well as some research and teaching materials, correspondence, and notes. It contains essays, conference talks, guest lectures, seminar lectures, book drafts, and other materials. The series is arranged into subseries for works, including: the essay collection We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture; Wynter's contribution to the essay collection On Being Human as Praxis; various iterations of a major planned work referred to here as "Ceremony Found"; "New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de las Casas"; works on C.L.R. James; and the majority of Wynter's other written works, arranged chronologically. Throughout her professional writings, Wynter covers a broad range of topics including Jamaican history; literary criticism, especially Caribbean or West Indian; Christopher Columbus's voyages to the Americas; African slavery in the Americas and the role of Bartolomé de las Casas; Jonkonnu and Caribbean cultural traditions; Black studies as an academic discipline; Spanish Golden Age theatre, especially its portrayal of Black people; Marxism; feminism; multicultural education and curriculum development; philosophy of human nature; and many other subjects. Writers and thinkers who she referenced and wrote about frequently include Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Ralph Ellison, Walter Rodney, and many others. A timeline of Wynter's writings, lectures, workshops, and other engagements compiled during processing is available here.

The Correspondence series contains primarily professional correspondence, including letters from professional colleagues, particularly other academics or writers in Black Studies, Caribbean literature and philosophy; notes from current or former students of Wynter; correspondence regarding Wynter's published works or contributions; and other types and subjects. Frequent correspondents include Demetrius Eudell, Anthony Bogues, Joyce King, Sandra Richards, Paget Henry, and Lewis Gordon, among others.

As of February 2026, the Academia, Research Materials, and Events and Engagement series are closed during processing.

Researchers are advised to review these Guidelines for using the Sylvia Wynter papers in the reading room.

Biographical / historical:

Sylvia Wynter (1928- ) is a Jamaican writer, scholar, thinker, and teacher. As a writer based in London in the 1950s, she wrote plays for radio and the stage, as well as a novel. As a professor, she taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica; the University of Michigan; the University of California, San Diego; and Stanford University. She has also published numerous essays on many topics from Jamaican history to literary criticism to exploring what it means to be human.

She was born May 11, 1928, in Cuba to Jamaican parents Lola Maude and Percival Wynter. Her family returned to Jamaica in 1930, and she attended school in Kingston before winning the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls in 1946, to attend University of London, Kings College in London, England. She studied modern languages at Kings College 1947-1948; Spanish literature at the University of Madrid 1948-1948, where she received a B.A.; then the University of London again, where she received an M.A. for her thesis on Spanish Golden Age drama in 1953.

Wynter describes her first career as a writer in England from 1954-1962 as working "as one of a group of London-based Caribbean writers who sought consciously to give imaginative reality to a Caribbean landscape as yet 'unstoried, unenhanced;' and to reconfigure the projected negative stereotype of ourselves as 'backward natives', that had been projected from the logic of colonial discourse." She wrote radio plays for the BBC, translated poetry and drama from Spanish to English, and wrote stage plays, including Under the Sun, written with Jan Carew, as well as a novel based on that play, The Hills of Hebron. She married Hans Ragnar Isachsen, then separated, and married Jan Carew in 1956, divorcing in 1967. Wynter has two children, Annemarie and Christopher.

In 1962, Wynter returned to Jamaica and took a position in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of the West Indies in Mona, where she helped create and supervise a new Caribbean interdisciplinary research project. She continued writing drama, including a commission by the Jamaican government to write a play, 1865: Ballad for a Rebellion, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Morant Bay Rebellion, in which poor Black Jamaicans protested their treatment at the hands of the British Empire, led by Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon. She also began writing critical essays for the newly founded Jamaica Journal, seeking to create a space "which could relate Caribbean experience to a conceptual framework." During this period, she wrote works including "Lady Nugent's Journal", "We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture", "Jonkunnu in Jamaica", "Creole Criticism", and "One Love: Rhetoric or Reality". During the 1960s and 1970s, she frequently used the name Sylvia Wynter Carew.

In spring 1973, she took a position as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan, focusing on developing an experimental interdisciplinary graduate workshop. She gave lectures in several universities across the United States, then returned to Jamaica before taking a position at the University of California, San Diego, in 1974. At UCSD, Wynter was a Professor of Comparative & Spanish Literature, and helped develop, create, and coordinate a new program, Literature and Society in the Third World. She remained at UCSD until 1977, when she moved to Stanford University.

Sylvia Wynter took the position of Chairperson of African and Afro-American (at that time) Studies and Professor of Spanish at Stanford less than ten years after the university had hired its first Black professor, James Lowell Gibbs, Jr.; she may have been the first Black woman faculty member at Stanford. She remained at Stanford until her retirement in 1997, when she became Professor Emerita. She was Chair of the AAAS Department from 1977-1980, spring of 1986, and 1989-1990, and she won several teaching awards. In 1981 she won a Rockefeller Minority Scholarship and spent the 1980-1981 year as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

While at Stanford she wrote extensively, and produced works including "New Seville: the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de las Casas", "The Ceremony Must Be Found", "Afterword: Beyond Miranda's Meaning", "On Disenchanting Discourse", "After Man, Its Last Word", Do Not Call Us Negroes, "1492: A New World View" (also the keynote address at the Smithsonian's New World Quincentenary conference), "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues", and many others. She produced drafts of Black Metamorphosis, a large unpublished manuscript exploring Black experiences in the Americas. She also gave numerous lectures and several interviews, including "After Allan Bloom: Towards Epistemic Literacy" at the University of Notre Dame, "A New Model as 'Demonic Model'", "Natives in the New World", "To Open/Restructure the Social Sciences?", "'That the Future May Finally Commence'", "After 'Man', Towards the Human", and many others. In 1994, an organization Wynter had co-founded, No Humans Involved, organized the conference The Two Reservations at Stanford, and Wynter presented the paper "The Two Reservations and 'Race' as a 'Cultural Question'". In 1997, a seminar organized around her work, "After "Man"", was held at the University of California, San Diego.

After her retirement, Wynter continued to write and lecture, including giving a graduate seminar called "September 11: Its Aftermath" at University of California, Berkeley, in spring 2002; presenting the paper "Human Being as Noun, or Human Being as Praxis?" in 2008 and "The Ceremony Found" in 2009; and publishing "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations" with Katherine McKittrick in McKittrick's essay collection Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, in 2015. She also worked with Demetrius Eudell to assemble the essay collection We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture, published by Peepal Tree Press in 2022.

In 2010, Sylvia Wynter was awarded the Order of Jamaica, conferred by the government of Jamaica for outstanding distinction. Her son Christopher accepted the award for her in Kingston, Jamaica. In 2012, she was made a fellow of the Institute of Jamaica, the country's museum authority and the primary cultural, artistic, and scientific organization in Jamaica.

Acquisition information:
The Sylvia Wynter papers were received by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Library as a purchase from Sylvia Wynter, via Anthony Bogues, in 2019.
Processing information:

Processed by Tracy M. Jackson. Assisted by Krista Bradley, Sony Prosper, and Epiphanie Ineza, 2023 July-2026.

Accessions described in this collection guide: 2019-0133.

When first received by Rubenstein Library, the materials in this series were mixed together with materials from other series, and significant portions were unfoldered. Wynter's original folders were often unmarked, and contents were often not clearly identified as one work or another. Wynter used and revisited the same materials for multiple projects, including for lectures, seminars, regular courses, talks, and published essays. Handwritten materials are often undated, and some dates have been inferred from accompanying research or other materials. This supplemental material has largely been maintained as is in an attempt to preserve any original context. Mixed folders of this type were largely kept within the Writings series, but some small amounts of related materials may also be located in other series.

Researchers are advised to review these Guidelines for using the Sylvia Wynter papers in the reading room.

Arrangement:

The collection is arranged into the following series: Writings, Academia, Correspondence, Events and Engagement, and Research Materials.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Contents

Using These Materials

Using These Materials Links:

Using These Materials

Restrictions:

This collection is currently undergoing processing. The Academia series, Events and Engagement series, and Research Materials series are unavailable until approximately June 2026.

Access note. Collection contains original audiovisual items that need to be reformatted before use. Contact Research Services for access.

Access note. Collection contains electronic records that need to be reformatted. Access copies of electronic records require special equipment. Contact Research Services for access.

Terms of access:

The copyright interests in this collection have not been transferred to Duke University. For more information, consult the Rubenstein Library's Citations, Permissions, and Copyright guide.

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Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Syvlia Wynter papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

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