Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking
Walter D. Mignolo
Abstract
This book 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, this book points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. It explores the crucial notion of “colonial difference” in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which the book calls “border thinking.” Further, the book expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling on the genealo ... More
This book 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, this book points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. It explores the crucial notion of “colonial difference” in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which the book calls “border thinking.” Further, the book expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling on the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. The book's concept of “border gnosis,” or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. A new preface discusses this book as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History.
Keywords:
power,
social sciences,
modern colonial world,
colonial difference,
postcolonial Asia,
postcolonial Africa,
imperial borderland,
colonial borderland,
South America,
Central America
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780691156095 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017 |
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691156095.001.0001 |
