Page 16 St Andrew High School is privileged to celebrate one of its most distinguished graduates, the Hon Sylvia Wynter OJ, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University. Sylvia Wynter is one of the most important and influential scholars of race and humanism in the 20th century. As a novelist, playwright, public intellectual and scholar Wynter has made transformational contributions to the fields of Black studies, and the Caribbean intellectual tradition. She is today one of the most creative thinkers in this tradition asking one of the foundational questions of our times---what does it mean to be human? A sign in the St Andrew High School Museum records that: “A school holiday has been declared on Friday 14th June 1946 in honour of Sylvia Wynter winning the Centenary Scholarship.” The Centenary Scholarship was established to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. Her work establishes her as someone who has taken seriously the commitment to remain accountable to those who continue to battle the legacies of racial slavery and colonialism in the Americas. On the 100th anniversary of her alma mater, St Andrew is proud to pay tribute to her with the Honorary Centenary Award of the school. The Centenary scholarship enabled Wynter to read Spanish at King’s College, University of London and in London she became part of a cohort of Caribbean literary figures, artists and thinkers who were deeply anti colonial. In 1962 - the year of Jamaica’s independence- Wynter published her first and only novel, Hills of Hebron which is an exploration of the deep challenges of imagining and creating new forms of community in the midst of enduring and deeply internalized systems of colonial domination. In 1963 Wynter became lecturer in Spanish Literature at the University of the West Indies, co-founding the Jamaica Journal and contributing to a major re-evaluation of Black working class cultural forms in the context of decolonization. In her early essays she was among the first to research Jonkonnu, Myal and Rastafari. She was a familiar and passionate presence in public discussions, and she wrote plays such as Ballad for a Rebellion and the popular Maskarade which incorporates the Jonkonnu form into its structure and story. In 1974 she became Professor of Comparative and Spanish Literature at the University of California, San Diego, moving to Stanford University in 1977 from which she retired in 1997. Sylvia Wynter received the Order of Jamaica in 2009. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of the West Indies and King’s College, London University. Her work has influenced an entire generation of young scholars and has been the subject of numerous books. She is also the mother of Ann Marie Isachsen-Fraser and David Chistopher Carew. With this award, St Andrew High School lifts her up, returns her to the place where she started from, celebrating her as one of our most transformational graduates whose work has itself altered the meaning of the terms, human, race, knowledge and education. With this award we recognize her profound contributions to the possibilities of creating a different world informed by a new understanding of freedom. Honarary Centennary Award to Hon. Sylvia Wynter OJ.
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