The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

Walter D. Mignolo

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781478001492, 9781478001140
• eBook ISBN: 9781478002574
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: World History

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. Geopolitics, Social Classification, and Border Thinking
• Part II. Cosmopolitanism, Decoloniality, and Rights
• Part III. The Geopolitics of the Modern/Colonial World Order
• Part IV. Geopolitics of Knowing, the Question of the Human, and the Third Nomos of the Earth
• Epilogue. Yes, We Can: Border Thinking, Pluriversality, and Colonial Differentials
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index