Description
Book SynopsisIn
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 reconstituti
Trade Review“Even regular readers of Walter D. Mignolo will find a wealth of new insights, analyses, and topics as he brilliantly considers some of decolonial theory's current controversies and new applications. With his hard-hitting insistence on the problems of Eurocentrism, Mignolo's spirited explanation and defense of decolonial theory is illuminating.” -- Linda Martín Alcoff, author of * Rape and Resistance *
“Walter Mignolo's oeuvre fiercely demands that we need to move beyond an engagement with the Euro American prison house of concepts and forge a theoretical vocabulary that is not merely an inheritance of colonialism. The decolonial option is premised on transcending amnesia—the manifestation of the colonial wound—toward traditions of intellection from the Global South. This new book shows yet again his uncompromising and ardent delineation of emancipatory landscapes of thought.” -- Dilip M. Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand
"Mignolo’s book collects a significant contribution into various key issues around decoloniality and the ongoing movement beyond Eurocentric modernity. . . . A powerful intervention developing decolonial thought in thinking paths forward and alternative futures rather than fixating or being limited to critique." -- Ali Kassem * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
"A hugely provocative, far-reaching, comprehensive and accessible book for scholars engaged across disciplines, geopolitical focuses, and languages. It proposes a particularly valuable provocation for scholars of European languages, especially challenging those of us for whom the jumping-off point for our analysis is so deeply situated in Modern Languages’ Eurocentric knowing and its attendant tactics of domination as factors to be taken for granted. It challenges and rewards the reader through its significant contributions to theory and the routes it offers to decolonial futures." -- Rebecca Ogden * Modern Language Review *
"Mignolo is at his best in his analysis of the nation-state and the limitations of Western political theories. . . . Mignolo’s magnum opus
The Politics of Decolonial Investigations is a sober description of the history of the world of the last five hundred years, its atrocities, and injustices, but it also gives us hope by describing the world that is emerging from underneath the ruins of Western civilization." -- Breny Mendoza * Society for U.S. Intellectual History *
"The Politics of Decolonial Investigations constitutes an essential point of entry for all readers interested in decolonization. Thanks to its ability to synthesize complex problems within the field and Mignolo's constant reflection on how to exercise epistemic rebellion in the face of the colonial power matrix driven by coloniality, this is undoubtedly a book that will guide the new generation of researchers into the distant future." (translated from Spanish) -- Omar Osorio Amoretti * Spanish and Portuguese Review *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction 1
Part I. Geopolitics, Social Classification, and Border Thinking
1. Racism as We Sense It Today 85
2. Islamaphobia/Hispanophobia 99
3. Dispensable and Bare Lives 127
4. Decolonizing the Nation-State 154
Part II. Cosmopolitanism, Decoloniality, and Rights
5. The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis 183
6. Cosmopolitanism and the Decolonial Option 229
7. From "Human" to "Living" Rights 254
Part III. The Geopolitics of the Modern/Colonial World Order
8. Decolonial Reflections on Hemispheric Partitions 287
9. Delinking, Decoloniality, and De-Westernization 314
10. The South of the North and the West of the East 349
Part IV. Geopolitics of Knowing, the Question of the Human, and the Third Nomos of the Earth
11. Mariátegui and Gramsci in "Latin" America 381
12. Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human? 420
13. Decoloniality and Phenomenology 458
14. The Rise of the Third Nomes of the Earth 483
Epilogue. Yes, We Can: Border Thinking, Pluriversality, and Colonial Differentials 531
Notes 563
Bibliography 641
Index 685
