Sylvia Wynter

In 2010, Sylvia Wynter was awarded the Order of Jamaica (OJ) for services in the fields of education, history, and culture.

In 1974, Wynter was invited by the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego to be a professor of Comparative and Spanish Literature and to lead a new program in Third World literature. She left UCSD in 1977 to become chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies, and professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University, where she worked until 1997. She is now Professor Emerita at Stanford University.

After separating from Carew in the early 1960s, Wynter returned to academia, and in 1963, 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 commissioned her to write the play 1865–A Ballad for a Rebellion, about the Morant Bay rebellion, and a biography of Sir Alexander Bustamante, the first prime minister of independent Jamaica.

In the mid– to late–1960s, Wynter began writing critical essays addressing her interests in Caribbean, Latin American, and Spanish history and literatures. In 1968 and 1969 she published a two-part essay proposing to transform scholars' very approach to literary criticism, "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 essays in which she seeks to rethink the fullness of human ontologies, which, she argues, have been curtailed by what she describes as an over-representation of (western bourgeois) Man as if it/he were the only available mode of complete humanness. She suggests how multiple knowledge sources and texts might frame our worldview differently.

In 1956, Wynter met the Guyanese actor and novelist Jan Carew, who became her second husband. In 1958, she 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.

Sylvia Wynter was born in Cuba to Jamaican parents, actress Lola Maude (Reid) Wynter and tailor Percival Wynter. At the age of two, she and her brother Hector and their parents returned to their home country of Jamaica. She attended the Ebenezer primary school in Kingston and, at the age of 9, won a scholarship to attend the St Andrew High School for Girls, also in Kingston. In 1946, she was competed for and won the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, which took her to King's College London to read for her B.A. in modern languages (Spanish) from 1947 to 1951. She was awarded the M.A. in December 1953 for her thesis, a critical edition of a Spanish comedia, A lo que obliga el honor.

The Honourable Sylvia Wynter, O.J. (Holguín, Cuba, 11 May 1928) is a Jamaican novelist, dramatist, critic, philosopher, and essayist. Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man." Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.