Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World

Artists and writers explore Sylvia Wynter’s postcolonial dismantling of origin myths and cosmologies

According to the influential Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, “we humans cannot pre-exist our origin myths any more than a bee can pre-exist its beehive.” Drawing inspiration from her seminal essays “The Ceremony Must Be Found” (1984) and “The Ceremony Found” (2015), Ceremony draws on Wynter’s thinking to suggest that “modernity,” contrary to its own self-image as rational and secular, is also determined by origin myths that emerged through the “mutations” of Christian cosmology after the dawn of capitalism in the Middle Ages. With over 25 contributions and commentaries on Wynter’s propositions from artists and writers, this publication constitutes a critical reference point for those seeking to construct and envisage a “counter-cosmogony” to the dispossession, slavery and extractivism of modernity that so endanger planetary life for humankind.