Local Histories/Global Designs

Introduction

Walter Mignolo, an Argentine semiotician teaching at Duke University, published the book in 2000 with the subtitle “Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking”. He argues that modern Western knowledge, presented as universal, is itself a local history that colonialism turned into a “global design”. Against it he sets “border thinking”, knowledge produced from the “colonial difference” by people who live between imposed and suppressed traditions; his examples range from Guaman Poma and Gloria Anzaldúa to the Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi and Caribbean writers. The book became one of the key texts of the decolonial turn in Latin American studies.

Connections

Builds on

• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza1987 · Gloria Anzaldúa
• Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America2000 · Aníbal Quijano

Criticized in

• Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses2010 · Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui