Beyond the Doctrine of Man

Beyond the Doctrine of Man responds to the question of how individuals and communities can live and have lived beyond the way the human person is defined in colonial modernity. This volume brings together essays that interrogate the problem of modern/colonial definitions of the human person and that take up the struggle to decolonize these descriptive statements. As the problem of coloniality transcends disciplinary constructions, so do the contributions in this book. They engage work from various fields, including ethnic studies, religious studies, theology, queer theory, philosophy, and literary studies. The essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man were catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person. Wynter asks this question within a larger project of unsettling and countering these definitions. Contributors to this collection follow in this move—sometimes in direct reference to Wynter’s work and sometimes primarily focusing on the work of others—of asking how Western modernity has naturalized itself through a discourse on the human. This analytical work taken up by contributors is at the service of unsettling and countering this naturalization.