Walter D. Mignolo

Catherine E. Walsh

Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh introduce the concept of decoloniality by providing a theoretical overview and discussing concrete examples of decolonial projects in action.

Concepts, Analytics, Praxis

On Decoloniality

Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität

Epistemischer Ungehorsam

Maureen Quilligan

Margaret R. Greer

The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.

The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires

Rereading the Black Legend

Craig Calhoun

Saidiya Hartman

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Siddharth Dube

Michael Herzfeld

Jean Comaroff

Ajay Skaria

Sandra Greene

Milind Wakankar

A special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly

Enduring Enchantments

The city of Florence is regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance. The fact that the economic and commercial power structures that developed during this time also brought about the colonization of non-European worlds through linguistic and semiotic hegemony, among other things, is to this day rarely incorporated into the traditional Florentine narrative.Post-colonial theoretical approaches question the role of the Latin alphabet, of printing, of language in the dominance of the renaissance narrative - in particular, these more recent approaches revisit social ideals on whose flip sides are the dispossession, canonization and hierarchizing of culture, memory and space. These ideals and their contrasting opposites unfolded, and continue to unfold, in the afterlife of the renaissance narrative.

Unmapping the Renaissance

Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how colonialty has operated around the world in its myriad forms between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries while calling for a decolonial politics that would delink from all forms of Western knowledge.

The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

The Idea of Latin America is a geo-political manifesto which insists on the need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe. Charts the history of the concept of Latin America from its emergence in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century through various permutations to the present day. Asks what is at stake in the survival of an idea which subdivides the Americas. Reinstates the indigenous peoples and migrations excluded by the image of a homogenous Latin America with defined borders. Insists on the pressing need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.

The Idea of Latin America

Gabriela Nouzeilles

Alberto D. Moreiras

A new journal inspired mainly by but not limited to Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinidad perspectives, Nepantla: Views from South is committed to fostering innovative reflection at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences. Drawing on the international and interdisciplinary conference "Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges", while also including outside essays, the premier issue significantly advances the subaltern studies debate. Divided into four sections, this collection opens with a set of "positions papers" that addresses the core issues surrounding transnational subaltern studies. Next, an essay section initiates discussion on such topics as Islamic feminism as "multiple critique", an examination of insurrection in El Salvador that reflects on North/South interfaces, and the question of borders and modernity from a Chicana perspective. The interview section features Americo Paredes. As an ethnographer, folklorist, poet, novelist, and essayist, Paredes has been a prominent presence in Chicano cultural life for the last fifty years. Finally, the closing section raises a discussion among several leading Chilean intellectuals about the conditions of university discourse in contemporary life.

Views from South

Nepantla

Arturo Escobar

This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as an epistemological restitution with political and ethical implications. Epistemic decolonization, or de-coloniality, becomes the horizon to imagine and act toward global futures in which the notion of a political enemy is replaced by intercultural communication and towards an-other rationality that puts life first and that places institutions at its service, rather than the other way around. The volume is profoundly inter- and trans-disciplinary, with authors writing from many intellectual, transdisciplinary, and institutional spaces. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Globalization and the Decolonial Option

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Libro que analiza la articulación de la colonialiad del poder comprendido como uno de los vectores privilegiados del sistema-mundo capitalista desde su configuración primigenia en el siglo XVI. En él, su autor introduce la noción de «diferencia colonial» y traza la emergencia de nuevas formas de conocimiento que denomina «pensamiento fronterizo».

Walter D. Mignolo

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