Amie Césaire writes that: “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” Sylvia Wynter adds clarity in that “[O]ur now immensely large-scale systemic injustices, as extended across the planet, are all themselves as law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institutionalization of our now purely secular and therefore Western and Westernized liberal/neoliberal Man’s homo economicus’s biocosmogonically chartering origin narrative!” Elsewhere, Wynter writes that “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.” Wynter’s vocation, according to Katherine McKittrick, works towards “the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.” According to David Scott, “The story of humanism is often told as a kind of European coming of age story. But this coming of age story has another aspect or dimension that is often relegated to a footnote, namely the connection between humanism and dehumanization.” This fact, in all of its complexities and simplicity, is the foundation upon which, as I argue in my work, human rights theory and practice was constructed. However, the tradition of resistance to this othering process and all of its knowledge production capabilities and capacities, an alternative conception of the world was formed. Conceptions that I call an Africana critical human rights consciousness. The processes of creating whiteness, and its antithesis blackness being stripped of its agency, its human—being was essential. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks highlights this dialectical process as the ‘zone of non-being’. Since its inception, capitalism has displaced and disappeared peoples not only through commodification and mystification, but also through marginalizing non-Western understandings of the world. For Wynter, social categories such as class, race and gender are all part of “the performative enactment of the Western world system’s [allocation of] degrees of domination/subordination.” What we will hear next is Dr. Paget Henry engage the life and work of Sylvia Wynter. Dr. Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000), Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction Books, 1985), and co-editor of C.L.R. James's Caribbean (Duke UP, 1992) and New Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983). Henry is editor of The C.L.R. James Journal and co-editor of the Routledge series Africana Thought. Sylvia Wynter is professor emeritus at Stanford University. She is normally described by some as a Caribbean novelist and playwright. Her thought is centered on advancing our understanding of the contradictions in the Man/human dialectic universalized by a Western project to assert its philosophical, ontological, epistemological, cosmological understanding as being THE standard to which all others should be measured—modeled. By will or force. Professor Wynter was born of Jamaican parents in the Oriente Province of Holguin, Cuba. Educated at King's College, University of London, gaining her MA in 1953 for a thesis on Spanish drama. In 1977 she became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. Wynter is among the most noted contemporary women playwrights of the Caribbean, rooting much of her work in the folk idioms of the region. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities...