With the 2023 Presidential Theme of "Working Conditions" in mind, our panel looks to Sylvia Wynter's 1992 essay, "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues" as an entry point into thinking about the epistemological conditions of contemporary humanities scholarship. No Human Involved (NHI) refers to the acronym used by the Los Angeles Police Department, and broader judicial system, in instances of police violence enacted upon "young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner cities ghettos" (1). For Wynter, it is the "episteme of Man's" classificatory logic that produces the concept of race and makes mythologies like "No Humans Involved" possible for thought. Wynter's critical thought rests on the destabilization of the "overrepresentation of Man" as the stand-in for the human itself. For this reason, Wynter's work is crucial in deciphering the biocentric model of Man, which has led to the emergence of human "truths," like race, to be recognized as natural occurrences rather than naturalized cultural narratives.

Wynter pens this letter to scholars in humanities fields as a reaction to the acquittal of police assailants in Rodney King's beating case in 1991. Her letter is a call for a reorientation of the humanities episteme. That is, how are we, as humanities scholars, responsible and complicit in maintaining the architectures of human classification that naturalizes police brutality against Black men, les damnés. She asks colleagues to consider the ways in which institutional knowledge replicates, and even institutes, the hegemony of Man and to reorient themselves towards the epistemic and ethical horizons of street knowledges.

Judith Rodríguez's presentation follows a speculative methodology that fabulates a conversation between bell hooks and Wynter, inspired by a 1997 interview between hooks and the rapper Lil Kim. This papers conjures feelings as structures of thought for Black feminist theorizing. Amari Iris Mitchell's paper considers Gwendolyn Brook's 1969's "Riot," written in reaction to the riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a poetics of the unheard and how Brooks' poetic voice considers the sensory experience of Blackness as counter to the sounds of white America. She argues that feeling/knowing through a riot displaces so-called white stability. Diana Farin Molina hones in on Wynter's claim that street knowledges enact a "cognitive escape hatch" (13) in order to consider how Black foodways and food expressions also entail a form of street knowledge. By using Toni Morrison's Paradise as an intertext, she argues that Black women's writings on food-related practices present a form of embodied knowledge, one offering an ethical horizon that contrasts against, and therefore illuminates, the violences caused by classificatory systems of knowledge. Elias Rodriques's paper compares the works and legacies of Cedric Robinson and Wynter in the context of their materialist foundations as it relates to contemporary Black radical thought. To do so, he offers a reading of each scholar's representation of police violence, their theorization of state violence, and the relevance of both to their theoretical work.

All four presenters take heed of Wynter's call to undo truths and rewrite knowledge in terms beyond scholastic systems of though. While the panelists' topics range across literary genre, popular culture, and structural violence, they all consider discursive methodologies by way of Wynter's speech of the street. Each panelist will have 15 minutes to present their paper and then we will conclude with a 15 minute question and answer session.

Work Cited

Wynter, Sylvia. "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues." Forum N.H.I.:Knowledge for the 21st Century. 1.1, (1994): pp. 1-17.