The Darker Side of Western Modernity

A scholarly book by the Argentine-born semiotician, subtitled Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Its central claim is that modernity and coloniality are two sides of one process: since 1492 the story of Western progress has depended on conquest, slavery and the ranking of peoples and knowledges. Building on Aníbal Quijano, Mignolo calls this structure the colonial matrix of power, which governs economy, authority, gender and sexuality, and knowledge. He criticises the Western claim to know from a neutral 'zero point', and answers with border thinking, epistemic disobedience and delinking, insisting that all knowing is located in particular places and histories. He distinguishes three possible futures: rewesternization, which restores Western leadership; dewesternization, in which rising powers adopt capitalism on their own terms; and decoloniality, which seeks a pluriverse of ways of living. Examples include the Zapatistas. Critics argue that the book generalises about 'the West' and rarely engages with empirical history.

It is the fullest statement of the decolonial approach in English, and gives readers a vocabulary, from coloniality to border thinking, now used across the humanities and social sciences.