Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamor­phosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

1146200873
Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamor­phosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

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Overview

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamor­phosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781531510251
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication date: 06/03/2025
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Justine Bakker (Edited By)
Justine M. Bakker is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She researches the intersections of race and religion, with a specific focus on alternative, heterodox, and esoteric forms of religiosity and method, theory, and conceptualization in religious studies.

David Kline (Edited By)
David Kline is Teaching Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity: Religious Autoimmunity (Routledge, 2020).


Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is an Africana Studies scholar and transnational ethnographer focusing on the ways Rastafari women build pan-African communities and combat anti-Black gendered racism and religious discrimination in the Caribbean and Africa. Her forthcoming book tentatively titled Remembering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women’s Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan African World is winner of the National Women’s Association and University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is the coeditor of Black Women and Da Rona: Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care, which was published with the Feminist Wire Books series at the University of Arizona Press in 2023. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion at Rice University (Houston, Texas). Clements researches Michel Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through his published works and the archives at the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Her first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self, engages the ethics of John Cassian (c. 360–c. 435) through Foucault’s interest in this late ancient ascetic as part of his genealogy of the desiring subject. Clements is at work on her second and third monographs, Chez Foucault: Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality and Foucault the Confessor, focusing on Foucault’s textual and conceptual shifts over his last decade.
Tapji Garba is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University. Their research engages political theology, legal history, and political economy from within the field of Black studies.
Oludamini Ogunnaike is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion from Harvard University and is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (PSU Press, 2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīh. Poetry and Its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020).
Anthony Bayani Rodriguez is Assistant Professor in St. John’s University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His current book project, Heretical Scripts, chronicles Sylvia Wynter’s involvement in decolonial struggles in the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States since the 1950s.
Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. His work employs decolonial approaches to examine the intersections between race, religion, politics, and secularization. He won the American Philosophical Association’s 2020 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought, and his first book (forthcoming) recounts the modern dialectics of secularization from the perspective of Latin American and Caribbean thought. His second book (in progress) examines the relation between philosophy of religion and political theology in the context of epistemic decolonization.
Joseph Winters is Associate Professor at Duke University in Religious Studies and African and African American Studies. He holds secondary appointments in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of Black religious thought, Black studies, and critical theory. His research examines the ways Black literature and aesthetics develop alternative configurations of the sacred, piety, (Black) spirit, and secularity in response to the religious underpinnings of anti-Black violence and coloniality. His first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, was published by Duke University Press in 2016. He is currently finishing a second manuscript, titled The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sylvia Wynter and Religion
Justine M. Bakker and David Kline | 1

PART ONE: The Religiosity of Being Human

1 On Self-Creation: Autopoiesis and Autoreligion
David Kline | 21

2 Symbolic Rebirth and Ceremonies Never Lost:
African Religions and the Paradoxical Progressivism of Sylvia Wynter’s Work
Oludamini Ogunnaike | 44

3 (Para)religious Traces in Sylvia Wynter’s “Demonic Ground”
Justine M. Bakker | 97

PART TWO: Science, Secularism, and Man’s Political Theology of Race

4 The Wynterian Turn: Human Hybridity in the Natural and Human Sciences
Niki Kasumi Clements | 129

5 The Ceremony beyond the Secular:
Postreligious Autopoetics in Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron
Rafael Vizcaíno | 153

6 Sociogeny, Race, and the Theological Genealogy of Economy
Tapji Garba | 171

PART THREE: Counter-religiosities beyond Man

7 Interrupting the Sanctity of Man: Wynter, Imperial Piety, and the Unruly Sacred
Joseph Winters | 193

8 Moving to a Realm beyond Reason:
Mapping Ontological Sovereignty in Counter-worlds of Liminality
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan | 211

Coda: Nuiscientia
Anthony Bayani Rodriguez | 235

Acknowledgments | 243

Bibliography | 245

Contributors | 263

Index | 267

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