Walter D. Mignolo: Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (1999)

“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.

The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one “civilizing” process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundialización, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 1999
Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History series
ISBN 0691001405, 9780691001401
xix+371 pages

Interview with author (L. Elena Delgado and Rolando J. Romero, Discourse, 2000)
Author on pluriversality (2013)
Review: Serge Gruzinski (Annales, 2002, FR).
Commentary: Linda Martín Alcoff (CR, 2007).

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (17 MB)

V.Y. Mudimbe: The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988) [EN, PT]

“In this unique and provocative book, Zairean philosopher and writer V. Y. Mudimbe addresses the multiple scholarly discourses that exist—African and non-African—concerning the meaning of Africa and being African.”

“Western anthropology and missionaries have introduced distortions not only for outsiders but also for Africans trying to understand themselves. Mudimbe goes beyond the classic issues of African anthropology or history. He says that the book attempts an archeology of African gnosis as a system of knowledge in which major philosophical questions recently have arisen: first, concerning the form, the content, and the style of Africanizing knowledge; second, concerning the status of traditional systems of thought. He is directly concerned with the processes of transformation of different types of knowledge.”

Publisher Indiana University Press, 1988
ISBN 0253331269, 9780253331267
xii+241 pages

Reviews: Christopher Gray (Int’l J of African Hist Studies, 1989), Paul Stoller (Am Anthropologist, 1989), Ladislav Holy (Man, 1989), Steven Feierman (J African Hist, 1991), Amselle Jean-Loup (Cahiers d’études africaines, 1991, FR).
Commentary: Marlene M. Archie (n.d.), Ali A. Mazrui (Research in African Lit, 2005).

Publisher
WorldCat

The Invention of Africa (English, 1988, 31 MB)
A invenção de África (Portuguese, trans. Ana Medeiros, 2013, 71 MB)

Marcel Duchamp (1973)

Catalogue for a retrospective exhibition co-curated by Anne d’Harnoncourt of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Kynaston McShine of The Museum of Modern Art. In addition to these venues, the show traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition, the third retrospective dedicated to Marcel Duchamp and the first organized following the artist’s death, was also an inaugural exhibition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s newly formed 20th Century Art Department. The museum has a substantial collection of Duchamp works, the majority of which came to it through the 1950 gift of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

The book contains a documented photographic survey of Duchamp’s works (over 90 pp), passages from Duchamp’s lectures, comments and tributes from 50 contemporaries, documentary illustrations, a chronology (over 20 pp), a bibliography (10 pp), and ten original essays by scholars and critics: Michel Sanouillet, Richard Hamilton, Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., Arturo Schwarz, David Antin, Lucy R. Lippard, Kynaston McShine, Robert Lebel, Octavio Paz, and John Tancock. The essays cover Duchamp’s explorations in the areas of language, poetry, the machine, alchemy, and the epistemology of art; on a more personal level, they treat the milieux and the friend ships that shaped his character, the life style to which he adhered, the influence his example has exerted.

Edited by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1973
ISBN 0870702963, 9780870702969
345 pages
via MoMA

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (86 MB)