Katherine McKittrick delivers Sylvia Wynter Lecture

The talk was an experiment in reading Nourbese Philip's poem 'Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones' from the volume She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, featuring Professor McKittrick's account of her initial interest in and subsequent abandonment of declension as a mode of reading.

Professor McKittrick distributed printed versions of the poem for audience members to interact with and test their own feelings on declension.

She also engaged with Wynter's 1968 essay 'We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism'. This work which aims to decolonise the type of discourse that legitimised imperial order, reconceptualise the history of Jamaica and the Caribbean, and develop an explanatory system that integrates knowledge born of struggle.

The talk concluded with short sonic interpretations of 'Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones' by artists Juliane Okot Bitek, Chloé Savoie-Bernard, Cora Gilroy-Ware, and Trish Salah.

This event was supported by Medicine and the Making of Race (UKRI) project, the Department of English, and the British Association for American Studies.