What does it mean to be human? Sylvia Wynter dissects the notion of this question by interrogating the conflation between the formulation of the universalized Western bourgeois figure of Man through violent imposition, erasure, and racialization, and the Human; ultimately arguing for exploring figures of the human outside of the Man. Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, Wynter critiques the purely bio-centric notion of human and pushes for another epistemological break, to figure homo narrans: a more hybrid-being, one of bios and mythoi A purely biocentric formulation of Human does not account for how the human was utilized in developing the figure of Man via racialization for imperial and colonial means. Thus, Zimitri Erasmus notes, the concept of human being bios-mythoi for Wynter encapsulates how human thought, consciousness, storytelling, and myth-making are an autopoietic process and become embodied and socially embedded within the figure of the human. For Wynter, the human is “both biological/organic and symbolic/myth-making;” “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.”Zakiyyah Iman Jackson draws from Wynter’s to formulate her own argument of how gender, sexuality, and maternity are sites of producing a human-animal distinction that reproduces racialization and Western figurations of Man. Jackson follows Wynter’s call for exploring different figure of the Human; one that blurs the human-animal distinction and explores the plasticity of antiblackness. Branching from this critical scholarship, this panel is interested in questioning the figure of the Human one step further: What does it mean for the figure of the Human when, not only is the human/animal binary is disturbed, but the human/supernatural binary as well, particularly in SWANA/South Asian contexts where cosmologies such as Islam (but not limited to) assert the existence of the unknown and supernatural? 

This panel encourages papers that analyze how beings including (but not limited to): jinns, demons, angels, fairies, God/gods, play into queer time, kinship dynamics, sexuality, gender, and the reconfiguration of the Human figure, one that does not have strict demarcations between supernatural/natural. Papers that delve into literature, film, oral tales, religious texts, and ethnography in the SWANA/ South Asian regions are highly encouraged.