Walter D. Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies

Please note: Walter has left the "Center for Latin American Caribbean Studies" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

CV    |   Google Scholar

https://openeducationalberta.ca/curriculuminfluences/front-matter/introduction/

Mignolo’s research and teaching have been devoted, in the past 30 years, to understanding and unraveling the historical foundation of the modern/colonial world system and imaginary since 1500. In his research, the modern/colonial world system and imaginary is tantamount with the historical foundation of Western Civilization and its expansion around the globe. His research stands on four basic premises: a) there is no world-system before 1500 and the integration of America in the Western Christian (European) imaginary; b) the world-system generated the idea of “newness” (the New World) and of modernity and c) there is no modernity without coloniality—coloniality is constitutive no derivative of modernity; d) the modern/colonial imaginary was mounted and maintained on the invention of the Human and Humanity that provided the point of reference for the invention of racism and sexism together with the invention of nature.

Briefly stated, Mignolo’s research has been and continues to be devoted to exposing modernity/coloniality as a machine that generates and maintains un-justices and to exploring decolonial ways of delinking from the modernity/coloniality. Among his books related to these topics are: The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1995), which was translated into Chinese and Spanish in 2015 will receive a Turkish translation shortly; Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007), translated into German, French, Swedish, Rumanian, and Spanish; Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000), translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Korean; and Turkish in progress); and The Idea of Latin America (2006), translated into Spanish, Korean and Italian. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis, co-authored with Catherine Walsh, was published in 2018 (with an Italian translation in progress) and in 2021 he published The Politics of Decolonial Investigations.

The political dimension of his work, in the past fifteen years has been increasingly devoted to the public sphere where he has worked with artists, curators, and journalists, to write op-eds, give finterviews (in English and Spanish), and to co-organize and co-teach summer schools in Middelburg, Bremen, UNC, and Duke. He also delivers workshops for faculty and graduate students in South and Central America, Asia, and Europe.

Mignolo was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovaks prize (MLA) for The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1996) and the Frantz Fanon Prize by the Caribbean Philosophical Association for The Idea of Latin America (2006). His work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Swedish, Rumanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Korean. He is an Honorary Research Associate for CISA (Center for Indian Studies in South Africa) of Wits University at Johannesburg. Recently, he joined the Dialogue of Civilizations (DOC) Program Council as a senior adviser. Additionally, he received a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree (2016) from the National University of Buenos Aires in Argentina (http://novedades.filo.uba.ar/novedades/entrega-del-diploma-doctor-honoris-causa-walter-mignolo) and an Honorary Degree (2018) from the University of London-Goldsmith (https://www.gold.ac.uk/honorands/walter-d-mignolo/).

Contact Info:

Office Location:	125B Friedl Building, Box 90670, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:	(919) 668-1949
Email Address:
Web Pages:	https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/ http://waltermignolo.com/

Office Hours:

Tuesdays and Thursdays by appointment (between 1pm and 3 pm) 

Education:

Ph.D.

École Pratique des Hautes Études (France)

1974

Research Interests: The constitution and transformation of the modern/colonial world. The de-colonial option as ethical, political and epistemic modes of re-existence. Decolonizing aesthetics and religion to liberate subjectiviy and spirituality

Current projects: I am where i think: globalization, epistemic desobedience and the de-colonial option, Racism, Capitalism and the De-colonial Option, Globalization and the Beautiful Life: Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic

Specialaties: Globalization and Globalism Darker Side of Renaissance and of the Enlightenment World Order Modernity/Coloniality Decolonial Thinking Decolonial Aesthesis Non-European Thinking Capitalism and Economic Coloniality Political Theory and non-Western Governance Dewesternization The academic categories of Scholars@Duke do not reflect neither my work nor my research and teaching interests. But that is what happened when you have to define yourself according to some else categories. They are institutional categories that do not allow for creativity and force you into the box-cage of orthodox scholarship. My work (thinking, writing, researching, teaching, networking) in the past five years (of which I do not foresee its closing yet), has been based, first, on the premise that “research” cannot be an isolated category of intellectual labor. This part was deleted----And secondly has been devoted to unveil the logic of coloniality (a logic of oppression, of expendability of life—“human and nature”-- hidden under the Salvationist rhetoric of modernity. Consequently, my work has been aiming and will continue to aim, to de-colonial projects going on around the world, moving away and disengaging from the belief in that history is one, although it admits diversity of interpretations. There interpretation however than have been silenced and histories that have been discarded by the pervasive work of the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being. What is going on in South America, in the re-emergent Chicano/Latino/as social movement in the U.S., and around the world are some of the signs of a global and massive shift in the geo- and body-politics of thinking. My work (that is, my thinking), has been oriented and focused on the dangerous celebration of expertise an excellence to the expense of experience, consciousness and thinking (critical for some, de-colonial for others). My concern has been and continued to be that expertise and excellence drives us to a managerial concept and practice of democracy; while experience, consciousness (double consciousness like in Du Bois; mestiza consciousness like in Anzaldúa; the consciousness awakening of Rigoberta Menchú (y así me nació la conciencia); the radical mestizo consciousness Rodolfo Kush, and Argentine philosopher of German descent) are the necessary orientation for a de-colonial shift toward a future of dialogue toward pluri-versality, rather than the monologue toward uni-versality. My latest manuscript, I Am Where I Think: Globalization, Epistemic Disobedience and the De-colonial Option (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Once we realize that “I think, therefore I am” took us (all of us, in the planet) to believe that thinking prevails over existence, experience, consciousness, is just a principle that benefits some and damages many, we learn also that the future couldn’t be imagined and thought out from the legacy of European philosophical and scientific legacies. It is necessary then to take seriously “the geo-politics” and the “body politics of thinking”, that is of places and people who were declared inept to think and to govern by themselves (bodies of color, primitive, barbarians, and places beyond the last stage of history---third world, underdeveloped nations, emergent economies, etc.). This manuscript closes a cycle that started with The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995), and continued with Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knoweldges and Border Thinking (2000). In the next five to ten years, my work will follow to diverse by complimentary path: I have already began to think and write on a trade-book titled Globalization and the Beautiful Life: Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic. Las Terrenas, a small town basically of people from African-descent, with a significant population of Haitian immigrants, is being surrounded by an increasing tourism of European provenance (US prefer Punta Cana), will allow me to look at globalization from the receiving end. Real state business, exploitation of labor, professional prostitution, racism, colonial memories and imperial realities, all combine to make of Las Terrenas one single place to understand the imperial/colonial histories of the Americas and the “beautiful life” that globalization makes possible. The second path, that I have already also started, is the writing of op-eds. The historical processes that we are witnessing in South America (a consequence of the consequences and the beautiful life of neo-liberal globalization since Augusto Pinochet, that pick up in the nineties and collapsed at the beginning of the 21st centuries), are just at the beginning. The debates around Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa (to name just the government that are breaking new ground in political theory and political economy, and that are making concrete the possibilities of decolonial options), are already heated and will continue to be. There is, at the same time, a notable disorientation among the general public on what is going on. “Turn to the left” has been the most common expression, and the most clear example that neither the traditional right nor the traditional left (or Marxist persuasion) are at a lost to understand something that is beyond their historical experiences. Here too, expertise is proven limited to understand, from outside and from above, a history that (like the missionaries of the sixteenth centuries), is totally alien to their own experience.

Areas of Interest:

Globalization and Coloniality
Racism and Latinidad
The Americas in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity
Racism, Capitalism and the Decolonial Option

Keywords:

Colonies • Decolonization • Geopolitics • Knowledge • Muser Mentor

Postdocs Mentored

• Julo Pinto (Augsut 1, 2014--July 31, 2015)  
• Andres Arguello Parra (Fall Semester 2013)  
• Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Scholarly year 2003-2004)  
• Bernal Herrera (Fall 2009)  

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. Mignolo, W, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Latin America Otherwise (2011), pp. 408 pages, Duke University Press (http://www.latamrob.com/archives/2551.) [ViewProduct.php]  [abs]
2. Mignolo, WALTER, Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Mignolo, W; Escobar, A, Cultural Studies, vol. 21 no. 2-3 (2007), Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles, ISSN 1466-4348 [title~content=g776420754~db=all]
3. Mignolo, W, The Idea of Latin America (2005), Blackwell
4. Mignolo, WD, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995), The University of Michigan Press  [abs]
5. Mignolo, WD, Epistemischer Ungehorsam. Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität (German Translation) (2012), pp. 210 pages, Verlag Turia + Kant, Vienna, Austria (Translated with an introduction, by Jens Katsner and Tom Waibel..) [pdf_3]  [abs]
6. with Mignolo, WD; Tlostanova, M, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (2012), Ohio University Press, Columbus, Ohio [pages/tlostanova%20learning.html]
7. Mignolo, WD, El vuelco de la razón: diferencia colonial y pensamiento fronterizo (2011), pp. 182 pages, Ediciones del Signo and Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, Buenos Aires, Argentina, ISBN 978-987-1074-95-2 [available here]  [abs]
8. Walter D. Mignolo, Loci of enunciation and imaginary constructions: The Case of (Latin) America, edited by Mignolo, W, Poetics Today, vol. I & II no. 4 (1995), Duke University Press, ISSN 1527-5507
9. Mignolo, WD, De la hermenéutica y la semiosis colonial al pensar descolonial (2011), pp. 145 pages, Abya Yala y Universidad Politecnica Salesiana, Quito, Ecuador (A collection of five articles, in Spanish, from 1983 to 1995 that are the foundation of my major books since ¨The Darker Side of the Renaissance.¨ An introduction by Gustavo Verdesio explains the trajectory..)  [abs]
10. Mignolo, WD, The idea of Latin America (Korean Translation) (May, 2010), Editorial Greenbee, Seoul, South Korea [articleView.html]

Selected Invited Lectures

1. Hegel's Spirit and the Opium War: Local Histories/Global Designs, March 14, 2012, Advanced Institute for Cross Disciplinary Research, City University of Hong Kong    
2. A Decolonial Archeology of Hegel’s Spirit: The Ming Dinasty, Pope Alexander VI and Matteo Ricci, March 28, 2012, Advanced Institute for Crossdisciplinary Studies, City University of Hong Kong    
3. Critical Theory and Decolonial Thinking: Two Parallel Roads to the Future, April 30 to May 1, 2010, Keynote address, New Directions in Critical Theory, Grad Students Conference, Tucson, Arizona    
4. The Spirit Croces de Atlantic and Move to the US: Hiroshima, Human Rights, Bandung and the Cold War., April 11, 2012, Advanced Institute for Crossdisciplinary Studies, City University of Hong Kong    
5. The Spirit Crossed the Pacific and Returned to the East Closing the Cycle of Western Imperial Expansion: Dewesternization and Decoloniality, April 25, 2012, Advanced Institute for Cross Disciplinary Research, City University of Hong Kong    
6. The Spirit Returns to the East: Rewesternization, Dewesternization, Decoloniality and the Roads to Future, May 22, 2012, Beijing, in 25th Conference of the Academy of Latinity - "Humanity and Difference in the Global Age", held at the Wenjin Hotel in Beijing, from the 21st to the 23th of May 2012, in cooperation with Tsinghua University    
7. Cosmopolitan Localism: A de-colonial shifting of the Kantian's legacies, May 31, 2010, Pusan National University, South Korea    
8. Epistemic Desobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, May 27, 2010, Seoul National University, Institute of Latin American Studies    
9. Coloniality and Decolonial Thinking: An Introduction, June 3, 2011, Hong Kong    
10. Second thought on geopolitics of kowledge and understanding, Inaugural Panel, May 10, 2010, Goldsmiths College, London, Workshop on Politics of Knowledge    
11. De-Schooling and Learning to Unlearn: Ivan Illich's Legacies and the Project Amawtay Wasi, June 22, 2011, The University of Bremen, Germany    
12. Who speaks for the "Human" in Western Humanism? A decolonial perspective, April 26-28, 2010, XXI Conference de l' Academie de la Latinite, Cordoba, Spain    
13. Globalization and the geopolitics of knowing: A decolonial view of the Humanities, April 23, 2010, Hilldale Lectures in the Arts and Humanities, the University of Wisconsin at Madison    
14. Global Linear Thinking, International Law and (De)Coloniality, July 1, 2011, Berlin, Goethe-Saal, Harnack-Haus, Max-Planc Gesellschaft    
15. “Geopolitics of Knowing/Understanding and American Studies,” Keynote address, April 8-11, 2010, American Studies as Transnational Practice, Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium, Lubbock, Texas    
16. The communal and the decolonial, Keynote Address, April 16, 2010, 20th Annual Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture Conference    
17. Modernity: The Way We Are, May 19, 2011, The University of Bremen, Germany    
18. Re-Westernization, De-Westernization and De-Coloniality, June 2 and June 3, 2010, Two lectures delivered at Peking University and Renmi University, Beijing, China    
19. The Global South and World Disorder, XXXth Distinguished Lecture, Journal of Anthropological Research, March 04, 2010, University of New Mexico    
20. The State We' re In- Cosmopolitanism, March 7, 2009, Birkbeck College, London [link.]    
21. Anti-Systemic Movements and Decolonial Projects, December 31, 2009, San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico    
22. Between Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Europe, Human Rights, and Sovereignty, March 6, 2009, London, Birkbeck College [launchworkshopflyer+mignolo+birkbeck+empire+and+cosmopolitanism&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AHIEtbRhE7]    
23. Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option, March 5, 2009, Goldsmiths College, London [available here]    
24. Geopoliticas del conocimiento y formaciones disciplinarias, August 3-August 14, 2009, Quito, Ecuador [Boliv]    
25. The Advent of Black Thinkers and the Limits of Continental Philosophy, June 29, 2009, Amsterdam, NiNsee [B]    
26. Transmodernity and Global Decoloniality, March 13/14, 2009, Tate Britain Museum, London [Bourriau.]    

Academic Director and Co-Founder, Duke in the Andes/Duke en la America Andina Director, Center for Global Studies and the Humanities