Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

by Walter D. Mignolo

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 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.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Anthropology, Politics, Sociology

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician (École des Hautes Études) and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality.

Reviews

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes from Mignolo's contributions in journal articles (cool stuff!):

- Language is powerful. The “other” languages have become involved in the making of the post-colonial discussion as a way of “including the other” in the discussion that had been established by the dominant. All the components should make up the conversation, rather than “include” others to an already-established discussion that was set by the European standards of civilization. Modernity has been regarded as a “European phenomenon.”

- From these readings, words like “democracy” and “emancipation” have a completely different meaning. Mignolo defines the ‘conolizer side’ as “Eurocentric categories of thought which carries both the seed of emancipation and the seed of regulation and oppression” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 459).
- He repeats this idea: “The development of the irrational myth of modernity, which is a justification for genocidal violence.”

- Instead of the language of modernity and emancipation, Mignolo opts, instead, for liberation and decolonization: for the delinking of border thinking. Will have to delink the overarching overpowering and overburdening European outlook and thought. Liberation first and foremost is the liberation of thoughts. The focus would be to take the West out of the central.

Note: One point that Mignolo does not seem to bring much attention to is in his reflections around colonialism as they relate to the Ottomans, and in how the Ottomans also did practice very similar colonial powers and dismissed cultures (the Arab culture and language included), in their enforcement of the Turkish language and standards of living by which they defied the pluralistic nature of society.

[Ryan Erlbaum · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'd like this book if you're a nerd. I'm a nerd. I am fascinated by studies that study the mechanisms of studying. Global conceptions of 1st/3rd world, ethnicity, difference, etc. are all mentally constructed, and this book explains the history of certain mental constructions and their implications.

I argue that the war in Iraq is possible because of our mental constructions of the "United States" and "Iraq"- one as a modern, white, developed country- and the other as poorer and back in time. This belief gives the USA the moral authority to invade- because, after all, the knowledge with in the USA is more advanced, and thus has the capability to deal with the primitive barbarity of less developed, third world peoples. This book gives countless insights to that idea.

However, it's technical and advanced- and will take a lot of time if you don't have a strong understanding of global history.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction is very intriguing. The interweaving of local and global I think is an important way to think about academic studies. The chapters honestly lost me but I suspect this is due to my lack of knowledge in Latin American Literature. But the book opened many new ways for me to think about the kinds of knowledge we value and why. This book challenges us to redefine what we mean by knowledge without totally throwing out Western ways of knowing. Really important work here.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cut to the chase man. He spends almost the entire book just explaining why he titled particular chapters that way. Blah, blah blah, lots of picayune word games going on, very low on substance.