On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human

Book excerpt: In "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues," Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter critiques the social and human sciences for perpetuating social hierarchies, particularly through the Western humanist framing of "Man" as the universal representation of humanity. Human development theories revolve around this concept, necessitating acquiescence to the category Man to claim humanity. But Blackness complicates and unsettles these terms in ways the fields of higher education and educational research are in many ways just beginning to confront. On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human extends Wynter's critique to human development and academic knowledge production, arguing that Black specificity can create new possibilities for Black being. Wilson Kwamogi Okello closely examines holistic development theory, aiming not to reform but to reimagine the "self" it presupposes. Taking what he describes as a multimodal and multisensory approach, Okello engages a chorus of writers, thinkers, and cultural workers—Baldwin, Bambara, Brand, Hartman, Lorde, Sharpe, Spillers, Wilderson, and more—to reframe Blackness as a social, political, and historical matrix, going beyond the study of Black experiences, biology, or culture. Punctuated throughout by stunning images from artist Mikael Owunna's "Infinite Essence" series, the book proposes and enacts a methodological attunement to Blackness that can guide theory, policy, and practice toward an alternative praxis for the benefit of Black living.