Local Histories/Global Designs

Local Histories/Global Designs is an extended argument about the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative Latin American and Latino scholars. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. He explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His 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. In a new preface that discusses Local Histories/Global Designs as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System PART ONE: IN SEARCH OF AN OTHER LOGIC Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference PART TWO: I AM WHERE I THINK: THE GEOPOLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE AND COLONIAL EPISTEMIC DIFFERENCES Post-Occidental Reason: The Crisis of Occidentalism and the Emergenc(y)e of Border Thinking Human Understanding and Local Interests: Occidentalism and the (Latin) American Argument Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial? The Politics and Sensibilities of Geohistorical Locations PART THREE: SUBALTERNITY AND THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE: LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND KNOWLEDGES ``An Other Tongue'': Linguistics Maps, Literary Geographies, Cultural Landscapes Bilanguaging Love: Thinking in between Languages Globalization/Mundializacion: Civilizing Processes and the Relocation of Languages and Knowledges Afterword An Other Tongue, An Other Thinking, An Other Logic Bibliography Index