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Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures. Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 408 pp.
In The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Walter Mignolo performs a series of theoretical moves that allow his inquiry into how we got to be the way we are, to both continue with his critique of Western epistemological practices gathered in his earlier The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) and also delve further into the global/local considerations engaged in his Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000). In the two later books, Mignolo emphasizes, explains and expands on critiques of the modernity/coloniality matrix of power-knowledge that stems from the thinking of intellectuals situated in the living-thinking conditions peculiar to Latin America's heterogeneous cultural formations. The title of this latest book addresses a growing awareness on the need to think less and less in terms that universalize, globalize or blanket different colonialities into a uniform post-colonial experience. The emphasis on the "Western" aspect of modernity recognizes the validity of the arguments advanced by the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro as well as the Indian historian Partha Chatergee on behalf of the notion of heterogeneous and diss-similar modernities which emerged from different periods of the modernity/coloniality matrix.
Further, The Darker Side of Western Modernity involves a double consideration. On the one hand it examines the European discourses that, even in the hands of radical thinkers such as Kant in his anthropology, relied nevertheless on the idea of an "other" as primitive and extraneous to modern (Euro) civilization. On the other hand, this book on Western Modernity assumes that such a historical period has run its course and that "9/11/2001" constitutes an iconic and real watershed in the (now) general course of human affairs in the globe. Thus, much of the thinking in this book is destined to examine new ways of conceiving a world order that in some manner need to be global but which in most other ways can or must only be local. This is in as much as the corporate globalization (a new universal) of human endeavors did in fact bring about the debacle of Wall Street in 2007. That event in and of itself raises fundamental...