Sylvia Wynter, OJ (born 11 May 1928)
Is a Jamaican novelist, dramatist critic and writer of essays.
Biography
Sylvia Wynter was born in Cuba to Percival Wynter and Lola Maude Wynter (née Reid). At the age of two she returned to her home country, Jamaica, with her parents (both born there) and was educated at the St. Andrew High School for Girls. In 1946 she was awarded the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which took her to King's College London, to read for the B.A. honours in modern languages (Spanish) from 1947 to 1949. She was awarded the M.A. in December 1953 for her thesis, an edition of a Spanish comedia, A lo que obliga el honor.
In 1958 Wynter met the Guyanese novelist Jan Carew, who became her second husband. With Carew, she wrote pieces for the BBC and completed Under the Sun, a full-length stage play, which was bought by the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1962 Wynter published her only novel, The Hills of Hebron.
After separating from Carew in the early 1960s, Wynter returned to academic study. In 1963, she was appointed assistant lecturer in Hispanic literature at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. She remained there until 1974. During this time the Jamaican government asked her to write Ballad for a Rebellion and a biography of Sir Alexander Bustamante, the first prime minister of independent Jamaica.
Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego to be a visiting professor for 1974-75. She then became chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University in 1977. She is now Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.
In the mid- to late 1960s Wynter began writing critical articles addressing her interests in Caribbean, Latin American, and Spanish history and literatures. In 1968 and 1969 she published We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism. Wynter has since written numerous articles in which she seeks to rethink the fullness of human ontologies, which, she argues, have been curtailed by what she describes as an overrepresentation of (western bourgeois) Man as if it/he were the only available mode of complete humanness. Wynter suggests how multiple knowledge sources and texts might frame our worldview differently.
In 2010, Sylvia Wynter was awarded the Order of Jamaica (OJ) for services in the fields of education, history and culture.
