“In this particular engagement with Black Metamorphosis, what we perhaps should understand is how Wynter becomes not just an anti-colonial thinker, but actually becomes a part of the Black Radical Tradition. Once she began to think of Blackness, she began to think of the enslaved as both labour and capital. She began to think about the questions of Blackness as lack, of Blackness as being non-human, and the Black enslaved both as exchange value and use value. All this meant that Wynter began to give us a different story of the history of capitalism long before the academy began to frame the study of racial slavery and capitalism under the term racial capitalism. For Wynter, there was now a different logic and ground of history. This history can be discerned in the enslaved thingfication process, refusals and processes of rehumanisation defined through a logic of freedom from domination, rather than a proletariat/labour exploitation/human emancipation one. From this perspective, a different understanding of the human as a figure emerges. What is fascinating to me is how this engagement is done through an exploration of culture as well as a critical engagement with Marx, while paying really deep attention to issues of labour. This different story of capitalism, its emergence and functioning pushes us to search for a different set of logics about what Black freedom might actually look like. Additionally, I would note that in one section of the manuscript, she begins to search for language which would theoretically describe this new historiography which she posits. Thus, she moves back and forth between calling the mode of production in the Caribbean and the American South a slave mode of production, suggesting sometimes that this might be a variant of capitalism. Here, one is reminded of Fanon’s remark that when it comes to the colonies one has to “stretch Marx”. In grappling with Wynter’s thought, we know that this discomfort with Marxism emerged in Guyana in the 1960s, when on seeing the manipulated, external, imperial intervention of the USA that led to conflict between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, she noted in an interview with David Scott in Small Axe, “My Marxism could not explain that.” What one should note is how the manuscript draws on Jamaican culture, particularly on dance and the practices of Rastafari. Given this, it is safe to say that during this period Wynter was working through a theory of Black culture and its relationship to radical politics. In the text, she would try to find the site of a radical politics of culture that could transform a society.”
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