Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $45).

Step 2: Register for “The Third Event” here.

In this workshop, participants will explore key reading methodologies for engaging the ideas and writings of Sylvia Wynter.

Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican writer and performer whose work combines the insights of Black expressive traditions and practices with natural sciences, the humanities, and anti-colonial struggles to consider how Black life holds the keys to understanding both our current predicaments and the practices / ways of life that might allow us to break from these predicaments.

Both avid readers of Wynter’s writings and those new to her work will familiarize themselves with her key interlocutors and methodological insights. The goal of the workshop is to offer a supportive environment to those who feel drawn to Wynter’s writing and would like to better engage her work on its own terms.

Bedour Alagraa is Assistant Professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in Black radical genealogies in political theory, history/ies of political concepts, Caribbean thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxisms, among other topics.

She has also studied and written extensively on the works of Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter, and is a member of the editorial team currently editing Wynter’s monograph, Black Metamorphosis.

Her book manuscript, The Interminable Catastrophe (forthcoming from Duke University Press) charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category / concept (rather than Event) via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. It also considers how we might interrupt the “Bad Infinity” of the catastrophic, via the works of Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Clyde Woods, Derek Walcott, and others.