Publications

Publication Background

My early publications (1978-1984) focused on semiotics, discourse analysis and literary theory. In the early eighties I began my research and publications on the making (invention) of the Americas, which was extended to globalization related issues since the early nineties. Coloniality and de-coloniality of knowledge has been one of my permanent and central concerns. Lately, and as a consequence of understanding the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality, I have been reflecting on the grammar of de-coloniality. I publish mainly in Spanish and English; but some of my books and articles have been translated to Portuguese, French and Russian. I have investigated different and seemingly interrelated issues, from history and cartography to religion and political theory, from Latin America to Europe and post-Soviet societies; from Indigenous to Latino/as and Afros in the Americas. In the end, I am a semiotician who abandoned semiotics as a discipline to read the word, the signs and the world.

My earlier books on semiotics and literary theory were written in Spanish and published in Spain and México. My latest books on Western modernity and coloniality and on imperial colonial expansion since the sixteenth century were written in English and published in the U.S. and England. Since 2000 several of my publications have been, directly or indirectly, an outcome of the activities organized or co-organized by the Center of Global Studies and the Humanities. Two of my books have been recognized with professional awards. The Darker Side of the Renaissance, received the Katherine Kovacs Singer Prize from the MLA, and The Idea of Latin America received the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Books

La Idea de América Latina
El término “Latinoamérica” sugiere que hay una América que es latina, definida por oposición a una que no lo es. En este brillante manifiesto geopolítico, Walter Mignolo retoma la idea de “latinidad” y emprende un seguimiento del concepto desde su nacimiento en una Europa en la que Francia era la potencia dominante haste la actualidad, pasando por la apropiación que de él hizo la élite criolla de América del Sur y el Caribe hispano en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.

A partir de la actual revalorización de los pueblos aborígenes, la gran población de ascendencia africana y los cuarenta millones de personas de origen latino residentes en Estados Unidos, eclipsados tras la imagen de una Latinoamérica homogénea, el autor se pregunta qué elementos entran en juego en la supervivencia de una idea que subdivide al continente americano. Asimismo, Mignolo esplica por qué una “Unió Americana” similar a la Unión Europea es impensable hoy en día, insistiendo en la imperiosa necesidad de abandonar una idea de latinidad que est´ asociada con la mentalidad criolla-mestiza decimonónica.

Mónica Gonzáles, Towards a Decolonial Horizon of Pluriversality: A Dialogue with Walter Mignolo on and around The Idea of Latin America

March, 2007

ISBN: 978-84-9784-094-1

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The Idea of Latin America
The term Latin America supposes that there is an America that is Latin, which can be defined in opposition to one that is not. This geo-political manifesto revisits the idea of Latinity, charting the history of the concept from its emergence in Europe under France's leadership, through its appropriation by the Creole élite of South America and the Spanish Caribbean in the second half of the nineteenth century, up to the present day.Reinstating the indigenous peoples, the enormous population of African descent and the 40 million Latino/as in the US that are rendered invisible by the image of a homogenous Latin America, the author asks what is at stake in the survival of an idea which subdivides the Americas. He explains why an American Union similar to the European Union is at this point unthinkable and he insists on the pressing need to leave behind an idea of Latinity which belongs to the Creole/Mestizo mentality of the nineteenth century.

December, 2005

ISBN: 1405100850

Blackwell Publishing Limited

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Local Histories/Global Designs
“Walter Mignolo, one of America's most eminent postcolonialists, presents a challenging new paradigm for understanding the realities of a planetary 'coloniality of power,' and the limits of area studies in the United States. Local History/Global Designs is one of the most important books in the historical humanities to have emerged since the end of the Cold War University. This is vintage Mignolo: packed with insights, breadth, and intellectual zeal.” Jose David Saldivar, University of California, Berkeley

This book is an extended argument on the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative scholars of Latin American studies. 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 practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of "colonial difference" into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls "border thinking."

Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by employing the terms and concerns of New World scholarship. His concept of "border gnosis," or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding.

January, 2000

ISBN: 0691001405

Princeton University Press

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The Darker Side of the Renaissance
The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World. Exploring the many connections among writing, social organization, and political control, including how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, Walter D. Mignolo claims that European forms of literacy were at the heart of New World colonization. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that the Europeans valued. Yet no one but Mignolo has so thoroughly examined either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through language. The book continues to challenge commonplace understandings of New World history and to stimulate new colonial and postcolonial scholarship.

October, 2003

ISBN: 0472089315

University of Michigan Press

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Writing Without Words
“Definitions of writing for the Old World are often a bad fit when applied to te recording and mnemonic systems of the Americas. This is a major point emerging from Writing without Words, a collection that balances theoretical expositions with analyses of particular exemplars. . . .Writing without Words is well-organized and original. It will be carefully studied by Mesoamericanists, and by people interested in the great intellectual enterprise of writing.” Monica Barnes, The Americas

The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing.

December, 1994

ISBN: 082231388X

Duke University Press

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