Black women and human emancipation: Sylvia Wynter, Angela Davis, and the New Consciousness

This chapter explores the relation between the emancipatory thought of Sylvia Wynter and Angela Davis. As with women of color generally, Black women exist in spaces of profound political and social exclusion, being subject to and yet often remaining unnamed objects of Euromodernity’s sexual and racial contracts. Radical Black feminist thought emerged from these conditions, generating important theories of domination in Euromodernity to which Davis and Wynter contribute. While their distinct interventions offer challenges at different levels to an economic and political system that harms all human bodies and souls, they argue it is Black people—and especially Black women—whose particular experiences embody the totality of Euromodernity’s degradations and that must be resisted and redressed. The chapter argues that, while their analyses primarily focus in different emancipatory domains, their diagnoses are substantively consonant.