by Alisha Archie
From the Text: “In ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom’, Sylvia Wynter (2003) argues that during the Renaissance, the West invented a new definition of what it means to be human which provided the foundational basis of modernity…Wynter’s (2003) argument builds on Franz Fanon (among others) who in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (2008) – focusing on the Black colonial experience, particularly in the Antilles where he grew up – recognizes through a self-reflective, psychological lens that the European colonial powers systematically erased and suppressed authentic Black identities and instead imposed racist, inferior identities on the colonized…Finally, I have deliberately chosen to leave remnants of the fixture visible around the edges of the Mirror for Nonwhite Peoples as a poignant reminder that the new descriptive statement of the human, Man, is fabricated.”