Walter Mignolo

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization is a long-awaited contribution to colonial studies, destined to be influential across a range of disciplines. This broad and ambitious work examines the role of language in the colonization of the New World by weaving together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, geography, and cultural theory. The Darker Side of the Renaissance significantly challenges our understanding of New World history. It will stimulate Renaissance and New World scholarship, speak to debates in current anthropology, augment our understanding of linguistics, and provide models for colonial and postcolonial scholarship.

"During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, coloniality emerged as a new structure of power as Europeans colonized the Americas and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time and Europe as the center of the world. Walter D. Mignolo argues that coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity, a complex matrix of power that has been created and controlled by Western men and institutions from the Renaissance, when it was driven by Christian theology, through the late twentieth century and the dictates of neoliberalism. This cycle of coloniality is coming to an end. Two main forces are challenging Western leadership in the early twenty-first century. One of these, {u2018}dewesternization,{u2019} is an irreversible shift to the East in struggles over knowledge, economics, and politics. The second force is {u2018}decoloniality.{u2019} Mignolo explains that decoloniality requires delinking from the colonial matrix of power underlying Western modernity to imagine and build global futures in which human beings and the natural world are no longer exploited in the relentless quest for wealth accumulation."--Publisher's description.

In 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 reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

What happens to thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical pedigree? In this powerfully honed polemic, Hamid Dabashi argues that they are invariably marginalised, patronised and misrepresented. Challenging, pugnacious and stylish, Can Non-Europeans Think? forges a new perspective in postcolonial theory by examining how intellectual debate continues to reinforce a colonial regime of knowledge, albeit in a new guise. Based on years of scholarship and activism, this insightful collection of philosophical explorations is certain to unsettle and delight in equal measure.--

The project takes its name from the demand for the transfer of power and other things to the newly independent Indonesia in 1945. It travels through time, from European colonial occupation through the development of the republican state to the trans-national contemporary cultures of today. It looks at the various international exchanges that happened in the territories of contemporary Indonesia through the images and ideas of artists. The catalogue and the exhibition will follow a broad chronological narrative, allowing readers and visitors to learn more about how this huge archipelago has changed over the past two centuries and to observe how it has responded and adapted to different influences originating both from inside and outside the islands. The influence of the imperial Dutch and Japanese occupations naturally form a signifcant element in the narrative of the exhibition as well as the constant struggles for different forms of independence or equal treatment by the Javanese and other Indonesian cultures. The importance of Chinese and Arab influence on its cultural history will also feature as the exhibition tries to look for other ways alongside the post-colonial for understanding the present.

"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.

This book is the outcome of of one of the workshops of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, held at Duke-UNC in May of 2004. -- taken from introduction.

The phrase 'the Black Legend' was coined in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as backward ignorant, superstitious and fanatically religious. This book challenges this by contextualizing Spain's tarnished reputation exposing how other nations benefitted from propagating this image.

298 p. ; 21 cm