Walter Mignolo

Walter Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and cultural theorist, long based at Duke University, and a leading figure in decolonial thought. With Aníbal Quijano and others he developed the modernity/coloniality approach, which holds that European modernity and colonial domination are two sides of the same history. In The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) and The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011), he argues for 'delinking' from Western frameworks and for 'border thinking' that starts from the knowledge of colonised peoples.

Key ideas

• Coloniality is the hidden underside of modernity: there is no modernity without coloniality.
• Knowledge has a geopolitics, because Western institutions have long decided what counts as knowledge.
• Border thinking draws on the perspectives of people at the colonial edges of the modern world system.
• Decoloniality calls for 'epistemic disobedience' and delinking from Western ideas of progress and universality.
• A 'pluriversal' world would let many ways of knowing and living exist side by side.

Major works

• The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011)
• The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995)
• Local Histories/Global Designs (2000)
• The Idea of Latin America (2005)
• On Decoloniality (2018, with Catherine Walsh)

In the Book corner

• The Darker Side of Western Modernity 2011 · Advanced
  A scholarly book by the Argentine-born semiotician, subtitled Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Its central claim is that modernity and coloniality are two…

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