Walter Mignolo - Local Histories/global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

EDITORS

Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley

A LIST OF TITLES

IN THIS SERIES APPEARS

AT THE BACK OF

THE BOOK

COLONIALITY, SUBALTERN KNOWLEDGES,
AND BORDER THINKING

Copyright 2000 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

First printing, 2000

First paperback printing, 2000

Paperback reissue, with a new preface, 2012

Library of Congress Control Number 2012935558

ISBN 978-0-691-15609-5

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Berkeley Ten

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

FOR ALL THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN

HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE, MANY OF THEM RELATED TO THE TOPIC

OF THIS BOOK WHEN IT WAS STILL IN PROGRESS

FOR MAKING THOSE CONVERSATIONS POSSIBLE, AND FOR HER

PATIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING

This book was published right at the edge of two centuries, in the year 2000. The main thesis advanced through it has been reinforced, since then, by the unfolding of global histories. For five hundred years, universal history was told from the perspective of one local history, that of Western civilization, an aberration, indeed, that passed for the truth. Ontology served philosophy well as it granted the Western invention of universal history the status of truth without parenthesis.

In fact, Western civilization had constructed its own history, had assumed that the history of the planet was its property too and that it was the point of arrival in an ascending history of the human species. Not only were the histories of other civilizations, coexisting with the Western one, relegated to the past of world history and to their localities, but by being placed in the past and being local they were also deprived of their own claim to universality. Western civilization managed to have the epistemic privilege of narrating its own local history and projecting it onto universal history, which in most modern terms was the global history of preexisting and, since the Renaissance, coexisting civilizations.

These were some of the concerns that motivated and sustained the argument framed in Local Histories/Global Designs. The / that divides and unites both terms of the title is the space of border thinking, for, from the perspective of universal history, the slash is invisible and only becomes visible when you dwell in and think from the borders. Thus, one of the strong theses of the book is that there is no modernity without coloniality and that coloniality is constitutive, and not derivative, of modernity. This is the basic condition of border thinking: the moment you realize (and accept) that your life is a life in the border, and you realize that you do not want to become modern because modernity hides behind the splendors of happiness, the constant logic of coloniality. For precisely this reason, border thinking that leads to decoloniality is of the essence to unveil that the system of knowledge, beliefs, expectations, dreams, and fantasies upon which the modern/colonial world was built is showing, and will continue to show, its unviability.

I am aware that many readers would feel uncomfortable with a description of Western civilization as a homogenous entity, particularly now that, with globalization (or, to be more precise, with globalism that is the neoliberal narrative of its doctrine and the Washington Consensus), the borders are broken and trades fly over the borders and migrants manage to crack the walls and move around police forces to enter developing countries and blur the distinction between Western and Eastern civilizations, Christianity and Islam, Latin and Anglo America, and Africa and Europe. In that view Western civilization may be a dream: the dream of actors and institutions that managed and built the modern/colonial world in the name of the universality of Western values.

However, during the period 1500 to 2000, one local history, that of Western civilization, built itself as the point of arrival and owner of human history. Ownership was expressed by building a system of knowledge as if it were the sum and guardian of all knowledges, past and presentG.W.F. Hegels lessons in the philosophy of history remain the single and most telling document of that epistemic victory. But this cycle is ending, and today there are strong planet-wide and diverse (not monolithic) tendencies in the writing of local histories that go beyond one history anchored in Greece and Rome; a tendency toward delinking from the myth of universal history that has kept them prisoner and affirming that there are no histories other than local. Recent attempts to recast universal history evince the nostalgic dream of imperial control of the past. Nevertheless, non-Western local histories (and knowledges) cannot be constituted without entanglements with Western local history. Border thinking becomes, then, the necessary epistemology to delink and decolonize knowledge and, in the process, to build decolonial local histories, restoring the dignity that the Western idea of universal history took away from millions of people. Taking away peoples dignity means that the entire sphere of life was attempted to be modeled around one supreme idea of life and the mono culture of the mind, to use an expression of Indian scientist and activist Vandana Shiva.

I shall mention once more that my discomfort with modernity and Western civilization (two faces of the same phenomenon) is not with Western modernitys contribution to global history, but rather with the imperial belief that the rest of the world shall submit to its cosmology, and the nave or perverse belief that the unfolding of world history has been of one temporality and would, of necessity, lead to a present that corresponds to the Western civilization that Hegel summarized in his celebrated lessons in the philosophy of history. Both the political and the economic expansion of Western civilization have gone hand in hand with the management of all spheres of knowledge. Or, worded differently, Western civilizations ability to manage knowledge explains its success in expanding itself politically and economically. My discomfort with Western civilization and modernity is also a discomfort with capitalist economy, an economy that puts growth before life and individual success before communal well-being.

It was Hegels monumental work on the philosophy of history that consolidated the historical worldview and worldsense It was this way of sensing/seeing that