Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking : Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

__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.

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.

Cover 1 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 8 Preface to the 2012 Edition 10 Preface and Acknowledgments 26 Introduction: On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System 40 PART ONE: IN SEARCH OF AN OTHER LOGIC 84 Chapter 1 Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference 86 PART TWO: I AM WHERE I THINK: THE GEOPOLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE AND COLONIAL EPISTEMIC DIFFERENCES 126 Chapter 2 Post-Occidental Reason: The Crisis of Occidentalism and the Emergenc(y)e of Border Thinking 128 Chapter 3 Human Understanding and Local Interests: Occidentalism and the (Latin) American Argument 164 Chapter 4 Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial? The Politics and Sensibilities of Geohistorical Locations 209 PART THREE: SUBALTERNITY AND THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE: LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND KNOWLEDGES 252 Chapter 5 "An Other Tongue": Linguistics Maps, Literary Geographies, Cultural Landscapes 254 Chapter 6 Bilanguaging Love: Thinking in between Languages 287 Chapter 7 Globalization/Mundialización: Civilizing Processes and the Relocation of Languages and Knowledges 315 Afterword An Other Tongue, An Other Thinking, An Other Logic 350 Bibliography 376 Index 404 Explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which author calls "border thinking". This title expands the horizons of debates under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America.