Walter Mignolo | |
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Born | Walter Mignolo 1 May 1941 Corral de Bustos, Argentina |
Occupation | Writer and professor |
Alma mater | School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences |
Notable works | The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995) |
Walter D. Mignolo (born May 1, 1941) is an Argentine semiotician (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and professor at Duke University who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought. [1]
Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina in 1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan.
Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies.
Mignolo co-edits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador, at the Politecnica Salesiana University. Since 2000, he has directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador.
Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson, and Tanja Ostojić. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch, published by Duke University Press.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, subalterns are the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Arturo Escobar is a Colombian-American anthropologist and professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His academic research interests include political ecology, anthropology of development, social movements, anti-globalization movements, political ontology, and postdevelopment theory.
Latin American subaltern studies was a group founded in 1992 by John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez. Inspired by the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, its aim was to apply a similar perspective to Latin American studies. It was one of the more important recent developments within Latin American cultural studies, though in the end the group folded owing to internal differences that were both scholarly and political.
René Zavaleta Mercado was a Bolivian sociologist, politician and philosopher.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, subaltern studies and postcolonial-decolonial perspectives, and social theory and critical thought. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History – elected to the Distinguished Category of Professor-Researcher in 2009 – at the Centre of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube is a member also of the National System of Researchers (SNI), Mexico, in which since 2005 he holds the highest rank.
Aníbal Quijano was a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the concepts of "coloniality of power" and "coloniality of knowledge". His body of work has been influential in the fields of decolonial studies and critical theory.
The coloniality of power is a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and Latin American subaltern studies, most prominently by Anibal Quijano. It identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.
Pedro Lasch is a visual artist born in Mexico City, and based in the U.S. since 1994. He produces works of conceptual art, institutional critique, social practice, and site-specific art, as well as paintings, photographs, prints, and works in traditional media.
María Cristina Lugones was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and at Binghamton University in New York State. She identified as a U.S-based woman of color and theorized this category as a political identity forged through feminist coalitional work.
Decoloniality is a school of thought that aims to delink from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world in order to enable other forms of existence on Earth. It critiques the perceived universality of Western knowledge and the superiority of Western culture, including the systems and institutions that reinforce these perceptions. Decolonial perspectives understand colonialism as the basis for the everyday function of capitalist modernity and imperialism.
Dalida María Benfield is a media artist, researcher, and writer. In Benfield's research-based artistic and collective practices, she produces video, installation, archives, artists' books, workshops, and other pedagogical and communicative actions, across online and offline platforms. She is currently faculty in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Visual Arts program, and was a Research Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (2011–2015).
Alejandro Arturo Vallega Arredondo is a Chilean-born philosopher, writer, painter, and Professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is also Faculty Research Fellow of the Center for Gender and Africa Studies of the University of the Free State, South Africa. In his work he develops an aesthetic philosophy, in which he engages the aesthetic or pre-reflexive affective, embodied and memorial dimensions of understanding and living experience.
Santiago Castro-Gómez is a Colombian philosopher, a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the director of the Pensar Institute in Bogotá.
Ramón Grosfoguel is a Puerto Rican sociologist who belongs to the Modernity / Coloniality Group who is a professor emeritus of Chicano/Latino Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley.
Decolonization of knowledge is a concept advanced in decolonial scholarship that critiques the perceived hegemony of Western knowledge systems. It seeks to construct and legitimize other knowledge systems by exploring alternative epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. It is also an intellectual project that aims to "disinfect" academic activities that are believed to have little connection with the objective pursuit of knowledge and truth. The presumption is that if curricula, theories, and knowledge are colonized, it means they have been partly influenced by political, economic, social and cultural considerations. The decolonial knowledge perspective covers a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, science, history of science, and other fundamental categories in social science.
Decolonization in Latino culture refers to contemporary treatment of and work with past colonialist and imperialist influences on Latin American society in the US.
Mabel Moraña is an intellectual and academic who has worked internationally in the fields of literary and cultural criticism in Latin America, being the author of numerous interdisciplinary publications that articulate perspectives on philosophy, anthropology, history, and cultural theory. Currently she is the William H. Gass Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also the Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the same institution. Her research work spans from the Colonial Period, particularly focusing on the Baroque, to the present. Her main contributions are in the areas of the study of national cultures, modernity, postcolonialism, and the history of ideas. Moraña has published articles and books on Andean cultures, Mexican literature and culture, as well as transnational issues. She has contributed to the critical development of categories such as the monstrous, migration, violence, issues related to gender, race and ethnicity, critiques of modernity, Postcolonial Theory, among other topics.
Coloniality of knowledge is a concept that Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano developed and adapted to contemporary decolonial thinking. The concept critiques what proponents call the Eurocentric system of knowledge, arguing the legacy of colonialism survives within the domains of knowledge. For decolonial scholars, the coloniality of knowledge is central to the functioning of the coloniality of power and is responsible for turning colonial subjects into victims of the coloniality of being, a term that refers to the lived experiences of colonized peoples.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a Puerto Rican philosopher and professor in Philosophy at University of Connecticut-Storrs. He received his PhD from Brown University in Religious Studies. His work has been influential in contributing to ideas about decoloniality decolonizing epistemology, and in critiquing Western liberalism and Eurocentrism. He is influenced by the works of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Enrique Dussel.