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“That Area of Experience That We Term the New World”: Introducing Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis”

This essay introduces Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World,” an unpublished 900-plus-page manuscript written by Wynter in the 1970s. “Black Metamorphosis” is a remarkable manuscript, and it deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the most important unpublished nonfiction work by an anglophone Caribbean intellectual and is the major guide to the transition in Wynter’s thought between her work mainly on the Caribbean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 onward. Not only does the manuscript clarify Wynter’s reflections on the process of indigenization and black cultural nationalism, it is her most sustained discussion of the politics of black culture in America. It constitutes a highly significant contribution to the black radical tradition and one of the most compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere ever written by a Caribbean intellectual.