Introduction
This chapter introduces readers to the struggle of decoloniality in relation to being—that is, in relation to how the human person is constructed in colonial modernity. It begins with outlining the way Sylvia Wynter has taken up this project and how essays in this volume engage Wynter’s work. It then turns to the function of religious cosmologies within projects of unsettling Man, while introducing essays in the volume that engage instances of how this project has been lived out in relation to religious cosmologies. Finally, it introduces the intersection between biopolitics and the project of unsettling Man in the service of introduction three essays that start from the effects of exclusion and oppression on concrete human bodies that have, through this oppressive logic, been reduced to bare flesh: bodies that are being deprived of a place in “the world”—that is, of meaning, of representation.