With strips from the full moon” and other “ways of knowing”: (Re)presentations of the “new” human.

With strips from the full moon” and other “ways of knowing”:
(Re)presentations of the “new” human.

Plenary session by Joan Anim-Addo as a part of the PARSE 3rd biennial research conference, Human, The Artistic Faculty, University of Gothenburg, Wed 13–Fri 15 Nov. 2019.

Drawing centrally on Sylvia Wynter’s theorising concerning the “overrepresentation of Man”, I return to the figure of the “new” human, suggested in my earlier essay, “Towards a post-western humanism made to the measure of those recently recognised as human” (2008). I consider “ways of knowing” through which the “new” human – grudgingly recognised as such only following the Abolition of Atlantic slavery and the financial compensation of their erstwhile masters – has begun the contemporaneous project of (re)presenting the self within a necessarily intercultural and transcontinental modernity. Reading texts by Caribbean writers Erna Brodber, Dionne Brand, Lorna Goodison and Jacob Ross, little known in European classrooms, I consider what such writing might contribute to our Humanities debate, particularly regarding Literary Studies within which Black scholarship and scholars are woefully and significantly underrepresented. I interrogate the place of violence that once sustained the historical degradations and inequalities in the project of overrepresentation, and currently underpins the contemporary underrepresentation within spaces of knowledge production. I attempt to disentangle the liberatory, affective and transcultural in this particularised speaking to the “genres of the human” (Wynter) that Racism and colonialism determined to erase, by exterminating so many human cultures related to the “new” human.