Wynter's Queer Revolution

Wynter’s Queer Revolution: Community Organizing and the Future of the Humanities answers the question, What’s the point of teaching humanities in the interregnum?

The book emerges from the wisdom of colleagues teaching Community Change Studies at public colleges with Black, Brown, immigrant, and low-income students across the U.S.—framing praxis with a vision for a Community Organizing Humanities. Grounded in practices of collective struggle, the pedagogies that nourish them, the decolonial thought of Sylvia Wynter, and generative insights of queer theory, this book licenses a new project for the humanities: cultivating “revolutionary collective subjects”. What if education itself, as Wynter suggests, were reimagined as an initiation into “queerer” collective subjectivities for the human species? Hannah Ashley makes the case that just as the humanities can enrich organizing, organizing can reinvigorate the humanities—bridging theory and practice to shape a more just and as yet unimagined world.

This rigorous yet accessible volume is essential reading for teacher-scholars working in public humanities, community change studies, or sustainability; and is practical and applied enough for organizers and anyone invested in reshaping the human story in this urgent time between the polycrisis and the world yet to come.