Walter Mignolo

DIVA new and more concrete understanding of the inseparability of colonialism and modernity that also explores how the rhetoric of modernity disguises the logic of coloniality and how this rhetoric has been instrumental in establishing capitalism as the econ/div

Global Futures, Decolonial Options

The Darker Side of Western Modernity

This book is an extended argument on the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative scholars of Latin American studies. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of "colonial difference" into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis," or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding. The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one "civilizing" process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundializacion, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason. In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

Local Histories/Global Designs

Madina Vladimirovna Tlostanova

Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas is a complex, multisided rethinking of the epistemic matrix of Western modernity and coloniality from the position of border epistemology. Colonial and imperial differences are the two key concepts to understanding how the logic of coloniality creates ontological and epistemic exteriorities. Being at once an enactment of decolonial thinking and an attempt to define its main grounds, mechanisms, and concepts, the book shifts the politics of knowledge from “studying the other” (culture, society, economy, politics) toward “the thinking other” (the authors). Addressing areas as diverse as the philosophy of higher education, gender, citizenship, human rights, and indigenous agency, and providing fascinating and little-known examples of decolonial thinking, education, and art, Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo deconstruct the modern architecture of knowledge—its production and distribution as manifested in the corporate university. In addition, the authors dwell on and define the echoing global decolonial sensibilities as expressed in the Americas and in peripheral Eurasia. The book is an important addition to the emerging transoceanic inquiries that introduce decolonial thought and non-Western border epistemologies not only to update or transform disciplines but also to act and think decolonially in the global futures to come.

Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas

Learning to Unlearn

Sömürgecilik Madun Bilgiler ve Sinirda Düsünmek

Yerel Tarihler Küresel Tasarimlar

Octavio Zaya

Wassan Al-khudhairi

The first monograph on Iraqi artist Hayv Kahraman surveys her figurative work, which mines the marginal space that pertains to diasporic peoples, collective and personal memory, and gender. The vital practice of Hayv Kahraman produces ethereal figures relating to each other in complex grounds. Their grace belies the brutal history of violence and displacement Kahraman’s subjects endure, creating an oscillating effect that entices the viewer with its seductive order. The artist combines elements of Italian Renaissance painting and twelfth-century Baghdadi illuminated manuscripts to create an evocative, hybrid vocabulary. Her quietly radical shifts—where traditional Iraqi screens’ geometric patterns are replaced with sections of a woman’s body, or a manuscript figure is presented as doll-like parts—convey the artist’s developing exploration of femininity, acculturation, and abstract patterns. Essays by Martin Daughtry, Walter Mignolo, and Octavio Zaya accompany works from all series to date, where graphic patterning attests alternately to violence and to moments of agency, community, and escape.

Hayv Kahraman

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, geography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World. Walter D. Mignolo locates the privileging of European forms of literacy at the heart of New World colonization. He examines how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, what role "the book" has played in colonial relations, and the many connections between writing, social organization, and political control. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that were validated by the Europeans. Yet no study until this one has so thoroughly analyzed either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through sign systems. Starting with the contrasts between Amerindian and European writing systems, Mignolo moves through such topics as the development of Spanish grammar, the different understandings of the book as object and text, principles of genre in history-writing, and an analysis of linguistic descriptions and mapping techniques in relation to the construction of territoriality and understandings of cultural space. The Darker Side of the Renaissance will significantly challenge commonplace understandings of New World history. More importantly, it will continue to stimulate and provide models for new colonial and post-colonial scholarship. ". . . a contribution to Renaissance studies of the first order. The field will have to reckon with it for years to come, for it will unquestionably become the point of departure for discussion not only on the foundations and achievements of the Renaissance but also on the effects and influences on colonized cultures." -- Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.

Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

The Darker Side of the Renaissance

Catherine E.. Walsh

On Decoloniality

Elizabeth Hill Boone

"This interdisciplinary collection of articles focuses on pictorial and iconic systems of the Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Inca, and the social contexts of writing during the colonial period, to challenge western conceptualizations of art, writing and literacy. The final papers offer stimulating discussions of interactions between European and indigenous writing systems"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes

Writing Without Words

An exploration of the role of the book, the map, and the European concept of literacy in the conquest of the New World

Freya Schiwy

Nelson Maldonado Torres

(videos indígenas y los límites coloniales de la izquierda) en Bolivia

(Des)colonialidad del ser y del saber

'Local Histories/Global Designs' is an extended argument about the '"coloniality' of power. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies.

Walter Mignolo

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