Of Border-Crossing Nomads and Planetary Epistemologies

Alvarez, David.
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 1, Number 3, Winter
2001, pp. 325-343 (Review)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2003.0061
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325
B O O K R E V I E W
Of Border-Crossing Nomads
and Planetary Epistemologies
DA V I D A L VA R E Z
Grand Valley State University
Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking
By Walter D. Mignolo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
ion nii oi i1s nu1uons occnsioxni vnoiissioxs oi xonis1x, vni1in n.
Mignolos Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking is a monumentally ambitious book, unabashedly global
in its geographic scope and self-assuredly sweeping in its assertions. In the
rst instance, Mignolo seeks to draw attention to the lacunae he sees in the
construction of the modern world systems imaginary and to the manner
in which other knowledges have been subalternized by hegemonic orders
of knowledge (global designs) emanating from the Occident during the
five-hundred-year period that began with the Iberian invasion of the
Americas.
1
But in a far bolder move, the author proposes what he calls gno-
sis and gnoseology as the epistemological means by which such lacunae
can be exposed and lled in.
2
Before I address the books conceptual framework and its epistemologi-
cal goals, I think it is worth noting that Mignolo considers the primary
research for this book to have consisted of (literal) conversations: with
undergraduate and graduate students, with fellow faculty at Duke University,
and with scholars across the Americas from North Carolina through the
Caribbean and all the way down to the Southern Cone. It is perhaps helpful
to see the book itself as a multitudinous (metaphoric) conversation, one
conducted simultaneously across countries, continents, and borders (of
both the physical and figurative variety). For within its covers, Mignolo
engages writers as ostensibly disparate in aim and idiom and as far-ung
from one another in location and method as the Moroccan theorist
Abdelkebir Khatibi, the Argentinean liberation theologian Enrique Dussel,
and the Chicana lesbian-feminist essayist Gloria Anzalda, among numer-
ous others.
3
On rare occasions, the conversation at the table around which
Mignolo convenes these diverse gures achieves a sort of heteroglot felicity.
I would submit, however, that for the most part the din and echo of voices
yield a kind of deafening silence.
What is the nature and object of this international, or, as Mignolo might
prefer, transnational, dialogue? Local Histories/Global Designs is by turns
intellectual history, metaphysical disputation, and cultural critique. (I should
note that the author might disagree with these descriptors.
4
) In his preface,
Mignolo asserts that his books main topic is the colonial difference in the
formation and transformation of the modern/colonial world system (ix). He
goes on to observe that a corollary of this overarching topic is the emer-
gence of the Americas and their historical location and transformation in the
modern/colonial world order, from :oo to the end of the twentieth century
(ix).
5
By themselves, these topics might be considered sufficiently weighty.
But, as Mignolo likes to note, there is more. Time and time again throughout
this frustratingly repetitious book, the author circuitously returns to one of
his central claims: namely, that theorizing and critiquing the lacunae in the
Wests imaginary from within the Occidents own conceptual schemas and
critical methods patently will not do.
6
Instead, he purports to advance no less
than a new epistemology for our postmodern, postcolonial, and post-
Occidental moment: gnoseology, or in more mundane terms, border think-
ing, a radically novel modality of critical thought that, so the author
intimates, transcends tired dualities, debunks dusty methodologies, and
consigns to the trashcan totalizing orders of knowledge.
7
Bo ok Re vi e w 326
What exactly are border gnosis and gnoseology, and whence do they
emerge? According to Mignolo,
Border gnosis as knowledge from a subaltern perspective is knowledge con-
ceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system, and
border gnoseology as a discourse about colonial knowledge is conceived at
the intersection of the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern
colonialisms (rhetoric, philosophy, science) and knowledge produced from
the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/
Caribbean. (::)
For Mignolo, border gnosis and gnoseology are not merely a form of knowl-
edge and a mode of knowing that call in question received ideas about the
constitution of modernity and coloniality and about the latters aftermath.
Rather, they transcend the discourses from which those ideas sprang and
which they have served to shore up. Moreover, they constitute the basis for
a new macro-narrative constructed from the perspective of coloniality
(o), one told in an other way by such thinkers as Abdelkebir Khatibi,
Edouard Glissant, Gloria Anzalda, Enrique Dussel, and Mignolo himself.
8
This macronarrative does not merely seek to tell the truth that colonial dis-
courses did not tell. (What that truth might be is left unspoken.) Rather,
the coloniality that it denounces and the decolonization that it announces
are of a discursive, and quite possibly mystical (one is tempted to say mysti-
fying), kind:
Macronarratives from the perspective of coloniality are precisely the places
in which an other thinking could be implemented, not to tell the truth over
lies, but to think otherwise, to move toward an other logicin sum, to
change the terms, not just the content, of the conversation. Such narratives
make it possible to think coloniality, and not only modernity, at large (o).
Leaving aside for the moment Mignolos subsequent, and possibly
immodest, claim that the epistemological implications of these possibilities
are enormous (o), it is important to note that the entire book turns on a
Dav i d Al v ar e z 327
pair of intertwined notions: the colonial difference and the coloniality of
power.
9
Here is Mignolos rst extended invocation of the two concepts:
The colonial difference is the space where the coloniality of power is enacted.
It is also the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking
place and where border thinking is emerging. The colonial difference is the
space where local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet
local histories, the space in which global designs have to be adapted,
adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is, nally,
the physical as well as imaginary location where the coloniality of power is
at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in dif-
ferent spaces and times across the planet. (ix)
It is hard to keep track of (much less seize hold of) what it is exactly that
the author means when he invokes the colonial difference. Sometimes the
phrase seems to mean something as ostensibly straightforward as the con-
dition of being colonial and therefore of being different from those who are
not colonial, a difference to which those located on the hegemonic side of
the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system appear to be con-
genitally blind or, at best, oblivious.
10
On other occasions, the phrase seems
to evoke a sort of two-way mirror through which the colonized peer at the
colonizers while the latter can only see their own self-regarding gaze. On yet
other occasions, the words seem to suggest an indenable yet powerful epis-
temological force, which denizens of the former colonies can appropriate in
contesting the assumptions and values encoded in the coloniality of power.
Which brings us to a second difficulty. While at times the latter phrase seems
to denote a slippery essence (akin perhaps to Foucaults protean notion of
power) that animates and constitutes all forms of colonial domination, on
other occasions Mignolo explains that coloniality is a conation of mod-
ern colonialisms and colonial modernities, the Janus-faced phenomena
that have spawned the hegemonic epistemologies against which he is waging
battle (zz). Sometimes, and perhaps more helpfully, coloniality means quite
simply, the reverse and unavoidable side of modernityits darker side, like
the part of the moon we do not see when we observe it from the earth (zz).
Bo ok Re vi e w 328
Whatever the phrases the coloniality of power and the colonial dif-
ference may denote precisely, it is at least clear that the author regards
them as being constitutive of hegemonic knowledges and classificatory
apparatuses that have led to the subalternization of other knowledges, those
located on the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system.
11
The
proper response to this tyrannous regime of discursive hegemony is to
imbibe a heady concoction of postbinary intellectual modes that globaliza-
tion is (ironically?) enabling: double consciousness, an other thinking,
Creolization, decolonization as deconstruction, and a new mestiza con-
sciousness.
12
The suggestion seems to be that if it is applied judiciously, this
potion will knock the stuffing out of disciplinary regimes, even explode
planetary congurations of hegemonic knowledge. The following passage
captures well the global marketability that Mignolo bestows upon one par-
ticular brand of this potent elixir:
Phagocythosis [Sic. Elsewhere in the text, phagocytosis, a term Mignolo
borrows from the Argentinean philosopher Rodolfo Kusch] is precisely that
moment in which the reason of the master is absorbed by the slave, and, as
in the Ponticial Mundo of Guaman Poma, . . . subaltern reason incorpo-
rates (phagocytes) another reason to his or her own. That potential, and that
intellectual force, is the privilege and intellectual force of all kinds of border
gnosis, from Douglass to Kusch, from Anzalda to Khatibi, from Ortiz to
Hall. Similarly, we nd it in the borders lived by Afro-Americans, Amerin-
dians, Arabs, Jews, Chicanos, and others. I am not, of course, advocating an
apartheid kind of epistemological privilege. I am suggesting that border gno-
sis, in its different manifestations, is the future planetary epistemological
and critical localism. The master-slave dialectics of Hegel is the past; the
epistemology of the present is border thinking. (:)
It is curious to note that subalterns (as opposed to scholars working in
Subaltern Studies) are conspicuously absent in this text that returns so often
to the themes of subalternization and desubalternization (of knowledge).
When subalterns do appear, however, they are often the objects of peculiar
readings. For instance, in elaborating on the signicance of Rodolfo Kuschs
Dav i d Al v ar e z 329
attempts to nd an authentically American locus of enunciation, Mignolo
notes the following:
Although Kusch didnt live to see similar development [sic] in other writers
and scholars (he died in :oo) the names and texts of Domitila Barrios de
Chungara and Jose Maria Arguedas, in the Andes, and Rigoberta Mench, in
Mesoamerica, can be added to the general project Kusch anticipated. Their
discourses, like Kuschs represent neither the other nor the community of the
speaker; they are cultural interventions that stake their claims on new places
from which to speak (e.g., local histories and critical claims to the particu-
lar) and, by so doing, contribute to the endorsement of a double conscious-
ness, a border gnosis, restituting to the subaltern an epistemological
potential of which they have been deprived: to know both the reason of the
master and the reason of the slave, while the master only knows his own rea-
son and the unreason of the slave. (::)
I shall pass over the puzzling notion that someone like Frederick Douglass
would have been ignorant of both his own reason and that of his master, and
pause instead at Mignolos characterization of Rigoberta Mench as not rep-
resenting her community, the Quich Maya. The most cursory familiarity
with Menchs public persona would suggest that she regards herself rst
and foremost as a representative of her ethnic community, both in her testi-
monial narratives and in her work as director of her eponymous foundation.
(It is in this light that Mench has been regarded by the Nobel Peace Prize
committee and by the Spanish judge who recently led a lawsuit against ele-
ments of the Guatemalan armed forces in Menchs name.) However prob-
lematic Menchs claim to representativity might be, one would think that it
cannot be cavalierly erased in the service of Mignolos novel epistemological
agenda.
Elsewhere in the book Mignolo contends that the Zapatistas are also
harbingers of a postnational spirit that moves beyond the representation of
communities. But it seems strangely perverse for Mignolo to represent
Zapatismo exclusively as another embodiment of his de-territorializing
gnoseological epistemology (::o). For while it is true that the Zapatistas
Bo ok Re vi e w 330
reach across borders in solidarity with other struggles, and that they avail
themselves of border-crossing internet technology to do so, and while it is
also true that their philosophy melds Marxist and Mayan cosmologies (::o),
it is also the case that they patriotically insist on their Mexican-ness and
that they deploy nationalist symbols (e.g., the Mexican ag) in their project
of transforming Mexico by recalling its revolutionary traditions. These facts
are surely at odds not just with Mignolos characterization of the Zapatista
rebellion, but with his peremptory insistence that the links between lan-
guage, ethnicity, territory, and nation need to be uncoupled (see especially
chapter : An Other Tongue: Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies,
Cultural Landscapes).
I should note that despite my hitherto critical reading of Local Histories/
Global Designs, there is much in Mignolos book to which I can nod in assent.
For instance, the desire to put Latin America (and the rest of the Third
World) on the epistemological map.
13
Or the observation that oppositional
high theory exported from institutions in northwestern Europe and America
north of the Rio Grande can, in certain cases, assume a sinister hegemonic
aura elsewhere. Or, conversely, the unimpeachable notion that the Third
World produces not just culture but knowledge, and that forms of knowl-
edge originating in the periphery have historically been marginalized, sub-
jugated, and subalternized. And who can doubt that imperial languages
such as English and French have more clout in the world than the languages
of former colonies? Or that denying the denial of coevalness is a worthy
endeavor? Certainly, the authors contention that neoliberalism is not merely
an economic and nancial matter but a new global design sounds plausible
enough. (Although what kind of design it might be is a question that, as with
so many others, remains resolutely unaddressed.) And who could dispute
Mignolos oft-repeated claim that other global designs originating in the
West such as Christianity, the civilizing mission, and technoglobalism are,
notwithstanding their universalizing pretensions, the products of local
power-laden situations projected onto the globe?
The various positions that I have summarized in the preceding para-
graph seem eminently reasonable. (Although, by the same token, none of
them strikes me as being particularly novel.
14
) Cumulatively, however, one
Dav i d Al v ar e z 331
acquires the uneasy sense that the author is mostly setting up straw targets
(e.g., Occidentalism, the colonial imaginary of the modern/colonial world
system) of such colossal proportions that readers might be dazzled by their
demolition not because of their actual substance but because of their sheer
bulk.
15
Furthermore, Mignolos ingathering of the nomadic tribes of theory
under the tent of Post-Occidentalism strikes me less as a truly emancipatory
gesture than as a reex at the level of theory of a sort of postmodern, cos-
mopolitan eclecticism la Lyotard.
16
Likening Lyotard to Mignolo might seem unfair given Mignolos persist-
ent disavowal of postmodernism and poststructuralism, both of which he
regards as products of the modern world-systems imaginary, useful enough
for an internal critique of that imaginary perhaps, but quite blind to the
colonial difference.
17
Yet the idiom and focus of Mignolos book suggest a
deep affinity with the styles and schemas of the more reactionary elements
of these movements.
18
It isnt just that the author seems overly attached to
the splicing of words la Derrida (Border thinking from a territorial per-
spective becomes a machine of appropriation of the colonial differe/a/nces
[sic; :]), or that the purview of the book is unremittingly and self-referen-
tially textual, leaving scant space for the social while fetishizing the semi-
otic.
19
It is also that as with assorted postmodern currents of thought, Border
Gnoseology seems to entail a euphoric jettisoning of the past and an exalta-
tion of the present, along with an exorbitation of language.
20
The present
that is here exalted is that of globalization, which despite being the latest
instantiation of the Occidents successive global designs, is also about to set
us free from the burden of history through the gnoseological wisdom and
spatializing magic of the market:
The current stage of globalization has market power as its nal goal. This
goal can dispense with the values attributed to civilization, since the goal
toward expanding the market doesnt contemplate the conversion of people
to Christianity or to citizenship. Although the markets objectives cannot be
detached from the ideology of development and modernization, . . . they are
spatial rather than temporal. The question is to expand the number of con-
sumers all over the planet rather than to move towards a nal destination set
Bo ok Re vi e w 332
up by the standard of civilization created in a local history (Europe) and pro-
jected as a global design. Thus the market is creating the conditions for the
restitution of space and for facilitating the intellectual task of denying the
denial of coevalness, the secret and natural weapon of the civilizing mission
and of the standard of civilization during the second phase of modernity/
coloniality. (z8)
This is all seems rather closer to Chase Manhattans report to its
investors in Mexico, say, than to Subcomandante Marcoss meditations on
the ravages of neoliberalism and on the grip of market ideology on erstwhile
Latin American leftists.
Contrary to postmodernisms frequent mistrust of grand narratives, how-
ever, Mignolo is unembarrassed to posit not just a macronarrative but a
telos, as the above quotation shows. Indeed, the thrust of the whole book is
that we stand poised on the brink of an astounding epistemological break-
through that will release a myriad subalternized knowledges from the
custody of abstract universals (88) and usher in a radiant future of desub-
alternized identities and nonhegemonic gnoseologies. Where exactly will
this world-historical transformation leave us? In his discussion of Bernardo
Canal Feijos attempts to account (philosophically) for the dislocations of
Latin American identity, Mignolo provides us with a possible answer: not
being able to be . . . where one is (:::). As the author emphatically notes:
Not being able to be where one is is the promise of an epistemological poten-
tial and a cosmopolitan transnationalism that could overcome the limits and
violent conditions generated by being always able to be where one belongs. I
am where I think (:::).
It is probably not accidental that the state of not being able to be where
one is would seem to leave us hovering somewhere above and beyond
historical circumstances, attachments, and determinations. For in Local
Histories/Global Designs, history is represented not as a site of contradic-
tion, struggle, contestation, negotiation, progress, and retrogression, but as
a grand succession of dehistoricized tableaux, devoid of actors, agents,
Dav i d Al v ar e z 333
subjects, and, most of all, of contextual nuance.
21
To be sure, the author
often provides us with a numbing concatenation of historical facts. But for
the most part the facticity of his argument is of a positivist sort that deprives
facts of their contextual and relational meanings. So, for instance, dates
such as :8:8 and :8o8 and historical periods such as the Cold War periodi-
cally make cameo appearances on the makeshift stage that Mignolo con-
structs, but they are then quickly shuffled offstage to leave us with an
ideal(ist) view of the theatrical space in which the historical action is
enacted.
Rosemary O Hanlon and David Washbrook have observed that in the
work of the scholars involved in the (subcontinental) Subaltern Studies
project, timeless and undifferentiated conceptions of the past are substi-
tuted for a time-bound and differentiated analysis of history.
22
The same, I
would submit, can be said of Mignolos argument, which for all its reliance
on the longue-dure histories of the world-systems school, seems to float
along in a dehistoricized void. Moreover, it seems rather odd that in a book
about subaltern local histories pitted against hegemonic global designs,
such matters as class conict and capital accumulation on a transnational
scale are conspicuous by their absence, as are such devastating agents of
globalization as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
23
Similarly, while there is much earnest discussion of hegemonic orders of
knowledge we find nary a mention of the authoritarian political regimes
against which many of Latin Americas subalterns must daily struggle.
Moreover, such timely topics as the militarization of the U.S.Mexico bor-
derlands and the neocolonial machinations of the maquiladora economy
seem to have no place in the authors purview. It might reasonably be
objected at this point that it is unfair to judge Mignolos book by criteria that
are entirely extraneous to its own framework. The author, however, insists
that his and allied projects have tremendous ethical and political ramica-
tions.
24
But what precise ethical and political meanings can we ascribe to a
text in which the enemy is not capitalism, or patriarchy, or imperialism, or
any nameable mode of domination but rather an indeterminate coloniality
of power straddling the desituated borders of the colonial difference?
Perhaps a positive answer to this question can be located in the manner
Bo ok Re vi e w 334
in which the book seems to confer agency upon those fractured subjects
who are emerging out of the fissures of our postcontemporary planetary
moment. Yet the book is mostly silent about actual (as opposed to textual or
authorial) subjects who straddle borders, who negotiate intersecting plural-
ities of meaning and difference, and who resist their psychic fragmentation
and material exploitation by divisive orders of exploitation.
25
One can only
regret that the author did not pursue a productive metaphor found in his
earlier work, the dark side of the renaissance, and probe what Alison Brysk
calls the dark side of globalization.
26
Conversely, it would have been plau-
sible to expect some discussion of the new social movements that are
redefining political practice across Latin Americas frontiers. Instead, we
have border-crossing, gnoseological nomads delivering a euphoric coup-de-
grace to moribund epistemologies before they leap into a borderless posthis-
torical future.
27
It is difficult, in the final analysis, to see where this rambling journey
through the epistemological circuits of the modern/colonial world system
actually leads us to.
28
Is the reader in the presence of a daringly innovative
form of critique that is poised at the sharpest cutting-edge of knowledge? Or
is the book a mystical meditation on our post-everything moment whose
meanings lie, tantalizingly, beyond mere rational grasp? In terms closer to
Mignolos own announced agenda, is Global Histories/Local Designs the
handbook of postcontemporary decolonization that the author suggests, or
is it a quasi-metaphysical tract for the new millennium? One is prodded
towards the uncharitable conclusion that Local Histories/Global Designs is a
ramshackle, tottering edice with shaky foundations and a decidedly wob-
bly architectonic. Or, to shift metaphors, that the textual economy of this
book suffers from runaway ination at the level of the signier with a cor-
responding impoverishment at the level of the signied. Yet for all its atten-
uation of the referent, and for all its ponderousness of structure and
portentousness of tone, Local Histories/Global Designs does occasionally
yield, through its own interstices and ssures, insights into matters of intel-
lectual significance and political urgency. At the level of its own global
design, however, the book is as gapingly problematic as the instrumental
systems of thought, geopolitical orders of knowledge, and epistemic
Dav i d Al v ar e z 335
schemata that it so sententiously seeks to denounce. In the end, regrettably,
the whole seems to amount to rather less than the sum of its parts.

N O T E S
1. From the project of the Orbis Universalis Christianum, through the standards of civi-
lization at the turn of the twentieth century, to the current one of globalization (global
market), global designs have been the hegemonic project for managing the planet. . . . it
is not difficult to see that behind the market as the ultimate goal of an economic proj-
ect that has become an end in itself, there is the Christian mission of the early modern
(Renaissance) colonialism, the civilizing mission of the secularized modernity, and the
development and modernization projects after World War II. Neoliberalism, with its
emphasis on the market and consumption, is not just a question of economy but a new
form of civilization. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,
Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000), 2233. Subsequent citations will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2. Although he asserts that his work transcends the Occidents disciplinary (de-)forma-
tions, Mignolo deploys metaphors and concepts borrowed from diverse intellectual
schools, movements, and elds in Western Europe and North America: Post-modernism,
Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, World-Systems Theory, and Border Studies, among
others. In addition, he draws extensively on the work of thinkers whose physical and ide-
ological locations straddle the interface of the West and the rest: notably, the scholars
associated with the Subaltern Studies project in its various avatars. Furthermore,
Mignolo converses with a wide variety of thinkers from Latin America, the Latino/a bor-
derlands, Asia, and Africa whose work cannot easily be pigeonholed.
3. The following is a partial list of the numerous writers and theorists whose work Mignolo
draws upon in elaborating his argument: Gloria Anzalda, Jos Mara Arguedas, Alfred
Arteaga, Hle Bji, Bernardo Canal Feijo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Michelle Cliff, Vine
Deloria Jr., Jacques Derrida, Enrique Dussel, Roberto Fernndez Retamar, Paul Gilroy,
Edouard Glissant, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Rodolfo Kusch, Jos Carlos Maritegui, Cherrie
Moraga, Valentin Mudimbe, Fernando Ortiz, Gyan Prakash, Anbal Quijano, Angel
Rama, Darcy Ribeiro, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Simply to
Bo ok Re vi e w 336
summarize the multiple ways in which Mignolo addresses these writers would take up
the space of this entire essay. Instead, I will tackle what I regard as some of the main
strands in Mignolos book, as well as what I consider to be some of its major weaknesses.
4. The author characterizes his intellectual endeavor as ushering in a Transimperial,
transcolonial, and transnational . . . cultural studies that could serve as a new inter-
and transdisciplinary space of reection, in which issues emerging from Western expan-
sion and global interconnection since the end of the fteenth century might be dis-
cussed and literary studies redened (221).
5. Local Histories/Global Designs brings together a cluster of concepts and concerns that
Mignolo has been pursuing over the past decade: geocultural locations (Mignolo 1994),
the darker side of the renaissance (Mignolo 1995a), Occidentalization/
Occidentalizacion (Mignolo 1995b), sayings out of place/decires fuera de lugar
(Mignolo 1995c), Post-Occidentalism (Mignolo 1996), subalternization of knowledges/
la subalternizacion de conocimientos (Mignolo 1997a), cultures of scholarship
(Mignolo 1997b), and post-colonial reason (Mignolo 1997c), among others.
6. This book is intended as a contribution to changing the terms of the conversation as
well as its content . . . to displace the abstract universalism of modern epistemology
and world history, while leaning toward an alternative to totality conceived as a network
of local histories and multiple local hegemonies. . . . Western expansion since the six-
teenth century has not only been a religious and economic one, but also the expansion
of hegemonic forms of knowledge that shaped the very conception of economy and reli-
gion. That it is to say, it was the expansion of a representational concept of knowledge
and cognition . . . that I will be attempting to displace from the perspective of emerging
epistemologies/gnoseologies, which I explore and conceive as border gnosis/gnoseology
and link to modernity/coloniality (Mignolo 2000, 22).
7. Mignolo chides various thinkers for remaining within the received conceptual bound-
aries of the modern/colonial world system, for thinking from the systems epistemolog-
ical core (as opposed to thinking from the borders), and for articulating Eurocentric
critiques of Eurocentrism (314). For instance:
Anthropologist and cultural critic Nestor Garca Canclini . . . describes the hybridity of the
border, but without engaging himself in border thinking. The hybridity of Tijuana in Garca
Canclinis argument is rendered in a discourse that is not hybrid itself, that maintains the
homogeneity of language and rules established in cultures of scholarship. (223)
Norbert Elas and Darcy Ribeiro, meanwhile, are still prisoners of the temporal arrange-
Dav i d Al v ar e z 337
ment of human histories implanted in modernity (308). Just prior to his criticism of
Canclini, Mignolo provides readers with an insight into his own hybrid use of language,
or languaging:
Languaging shall be controlled by rules, and one must respect grammatical structure, dis-
course coherence, and argumentative logic. All this is certainly ne, but it is neither the
only way nor the best way to produce, transplant, and transform knowledge. (222)
8. In his discussion of the etymology of gnosis and gnoseology, Mignolo is careful to dis-
tinguish them from the false friend of (early Christian) Gnosticism:
We are obviously no longer at the beginning of the Christian era and salvation is not a proper
term to dene the practicality of knowledge, and neither is its claim to truth. But we need
to open up the space that epistemology took over from gnoseology, and aim it not at God
but at the uncertainties of the borders. Our goals are not salvation but decolonization, and
transformations of the rigidity of epistemic and territorial frontiers established and con-
trolled by the coloniality of power in the building of the modern/colonial world system. (12)
Despite the authors disclaimer, there seems to be a strain of evangelical logic at work in
this passage as in much of the book. The author speaks to us in (other) tongues and we
are supposed to take his (fractured) utterances on faith. Or, to use a metaphor more in
tune with the cultural aura of late capitalism, in reading this book we can imagine our-
selves to be standing on the beach of knowledge as morning approaches. Behind us,
looms the dark night of Euro-epistemology, while ahead of us, rising above the post-
Occidental horizon, beams the dazzling dawn sun of the New Age.
9. The second of these two terms is a direct translation of the phrase la colonialidad del
poder, coined by the Bolivian sociologist Anbal Quijano. The first appears to be
Mignolos own coinage.
10. Strangely enough, in a book that censures the complicity between coloniality and
dichotomy, the author keeps returning to a dichotomous image, that of the interior/exte-
rior border:
Border gnoseology is a critical reection on knowledge production from both the interior
borders of the colonial world system (imperial conicts, hegemonic languages, directional-
ity of translations, etc.) and its exterior borders (imperial conflicts with other cultures
being colonized as well as the subsequent stages of independence or decolonization). (11)
11. The confusion I have experienced in trying to grasp what the authors concepts denote
might just arise from the authors animus against denotation:
This tension between hegemonic epistemology with emphasis on denotation and truth,
Bo ok Re vi e w 338
and subaltern epistemologies with emphasis on performance and transformation shows
the contentions and the struggle for power. It also shows how the exercise of the colonial-
ity of power (anchored on denotative epistemology) and the will to truth attributes itself
the right to question alternatives whose will to truth is preceded by the will to transform
a will to transform, like in Rigoberta Mench, emerging from the experience of the colonial
difference engrained in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world since 1500. (26)
It would surely come as a surprise to Rigoberta Mench to learn that her testimonios and
her representations on behalf of indigenous Guatemalans have less to do with the truths
of Guatemalan history and those of her experience than with a desituated perform-
ance enacted beyond a territorial epistemology (26).
12. What all these key words have in common is their disruption of dichotomies through
themselves being a dichotomy. This, in other words, is the key conguration of border
thinking: thinking from dichotomous concepts rather than ordering the world in
dichotomies. Border thinking, in other words, is, logically, a dichotomous locus of enun-
ciation and, historically, is located at the borders (interiors or exteriors) of the mod-
ern/colonial world system . . . (85).
13. Although one wonders about the ways in which Mignolo marshals thinkers like Enrique
Dussel, Anbal Quijano, and Silvia Cusicanqui to his cause, it is doubtless a good thing
that he introduces their work to anglophone audiences.
14. For a stingingly eloquent denunciation of the dark side of modernity that anticipates
Mignolos by over a century, we could do worse than read Frederick Douglasss writings.
Or we could travel back in time a century further and read the narratives of Afro-British
former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano, who exposed the Enlightenments other face.
Returning to the middle years of our own century, we might recall Walter Benjamins
famously terse condemnation of the dark side of European culture: There is no docu-
ment of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 256.
15. Here are two definitions of Occidentalism: Occidentalism is basically the master
metaphor of colonial discourse since the sixteenth century and specically in relation to
the inclusion of the Americas as part and margin of the West (327). I call Occidentalism,
then, the Western version of Western civilization (its own self-description) ingrained in the
imaginary of the modern/colonial world (328, authors emphasis).
16. Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae,
watches a Western, eats McDonalds food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears
Dav i d Al v ar e z 339
Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV
games. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1984), 45. Cf., Mignolos praise of the
new cosmopolitan transnationalism (334).
17. Grammatology and deconstruction have vis--vis the colonial experience the same lim-
itations as Marxism vis--vis race and indigenous communities in the colonized world:
the colonial difference is invisible to them. Decolonization should be thought of as com-
plementary to deconstruction and border thinking, complementary to the double
sance within the experience and sensibilities of the coloniality of power (326).
18. For a robust defense of universalism and critique of postmodernisms giddy celebra-
tion of local situations and language games, see Edward Saids Representations of the
Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), especially chapters 1 and 5.
19. In my view, the cumulative weight of such frequently invoked phrases as another think-
ing that is thinking in languages, irreducible epistemic differences, and the like serves
to obscure whatever referential thrust the authors argument may have.
20. For all its talk of plurilanguaging and multiple loci of enunciation, the book often
portrays languages as static entities. Certainly, as the author repeatedly states, English
and French have played hegemonic roles in the production, transmission, and mediation
of knowledge at various points since the overseas expansion of England and France, but
to regard these languages as unchanging hegemonic essences is to disregard one of the
central insights of postcolonial studies, the manner in which imperial languages have
been appropriated, transformed, and adapted at the receiving end of the colonial
encounter.
21. When the author does try to engage in a discussion of concrete (and contentious) his-
torical particulars, the results are tellingly reductive. See, for instance, Mignolos brief
and baffling discussion of the Cuban Revolution (3356), of which he says: a new form
of colonialism without territorial possession, similar to that of the United States in logic
but opposite in content, invaded the history of Latin America (335). This strikes me as
a contextually impoverished perspective on Cubas complex and embattled experiment
with socialism, one rather closer to Ronald Reagans world-view than to counter-hege-
monic currents in Latin American thought.
22. Rosalind OHanlon and David Washbrook, After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and
Politics in the Third World, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992):
144.
Bo ok Re vi e w 340
23. I am aware of the multiple ways in which class is imbricated with other modalities of
experience and knowledge, and I make this observation not in order to privilege class
over other categories of analysis and experience but to note the fact that class seems
utterly invisible to the authors gaze. Thus it is that while we get several tables depicting
percentages of speakers of the worlds hegemonic languages there is not a single statis-
tic about wealth or poverty.
24. Thus, a consequent description of [Abdelkebir Khatibis] an other thinking is the fol-
lowing: a way of thinking that is not inspired in it own limitations and is not intended
to dominate and to humiliate; a way of thinking that is universally marginal, fragmen-
tary, and unachieved; and, as such, a way of thinking that, because universally marginal
and fragmentary, is not ethnocida. . . . Thus, the ethical potential of an other thinking
(68, authors emphasis). Later, Mignolo aligns his work with that of the larger movement
of decolonization:
My argument implies the legacies of the early modern and colonial periods (modernity and
coloniality) and joins forces with efforts to de-modernize and de-colonize scholarship,
along with discourses in the public sphere that emerged in postmodern and postcolonial
theorizing after World War II. (219)
25. Epifanio San Juan, Jr. is acerbically eloquent on the subject of silence in high theoretical
production, in this case that of postcolonial theory of the psychoanalytic and decon-
structive variety, which Mignolo claims to transcend while replicating many of its obfus-
catory moves:
What happened in Thailand [a re at a Bangkok factory in 1993 in which 188 workers pro-
ducing stuffed toys for U.S. corporations were killed] is replicated . . . in the plight of the
Mexican maquiladoras, Filipina domestics in the Middle East, and the exploitation of child
labor around the world. In textualizing or aestheticizing such realities, postcolonial theory
has virtually postalized and consigned them to a transcendental and reied locus beyond
rescue, a domain that the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire once called the culture of silence.
Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 14.
26. Alison Brysk, Globalization: The Double-Edged Sword, NACLA Report on the Americas
34, no. 1 (2000): 2933.
27. That future is envisaged as one in which Toynbeean geographical-cultural civilizations
shift tectonically across the surface of the planet, giving rise to new gnoseological
knowledge along their fault-lines. See Mignolos (un-ironic) comparison of his schema
with that of Samuel P. Huntington and Henry Kissinger (3078). For a Marxist critique
Dav i d Al v ar e z 341
of abstract civilizational theories, see Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in
the Postcolonial World (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially
chapter 1, Modernity, Globalization, and the West.
28. It is to be regretted that Princeton University Press did not devote as much care to copy-
editing Mignolos manuscript as it did to the design of the books attractive cover. For
the readers good-faith effort to engage this circumlocutory text is hardly encouraged by
the abundant typographical errors and clunky constructions that blot the landscape of
the authors prose. These blots range from the amusing (the oddly-named author
Gargand Poinkh [sic], turns out to refer to the authors [Pulin K.] Garg and [Indira J.]
Parikh), to the not-so-amusing (on one occasion Rigoberta Mench appears as
Rigogerta, on another as Manch. Numerous typos and missing references would
perhaps be readily forgivable were the authors prose a bit more digestible. But through-
out the book one regularly stumbles across sentences such as the following:
The decolonization movement contributed to clarify that the standard of civilization were
[sic] an aggressive political move from the European and colonizer country, backing a local
ideal into the universal claims of early Christianity reconverted into local histories of sci-
ences as the universal savior [sic] (287).
Moreover, long meandering paragraphs often ow into deltas of truism, as in the fol-
lowing example:
Changing global designs transforms [sic] the structure of the coloniality of power within
the imperial conict and the logic of the modern world system. Successive global designs
rearticulated the system, reorganized the structure of power, redrew the interior borders,
and traced new exterior ones. Asia and Africa, for instance, colonized by France and
England at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, established
a new world order in relation to previous colonial relations between France in England in
North America and the Caribbean. For that reason, Jamaica is not India and Martinique is
not Algeria. (281)
It may seem churlish to draw the readers attention to such ostensibly supercial mat-
ters, but one suspects that they reect a deeper problem; viz., the attempt to raise a
bizarre amalgam of truism, hyperbole, and occasional insight to the status of a new
macro- (master?) narrative.
Bo ok Re vi e w 342
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Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester, U.K.:
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Mignolo, Walter D. 1994. Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial?: the Politics and
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Dav i d Al v ar e z 343