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

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Braco Dimitrijević: Tractatus Post-Historicus (1976/2009) [EN, DE]

“Tractatus Post-Historicus (1976), a philosophical manifesto about the idea of “post history,” as well as other early writings including Why I Paint Like Pollock (1972), are newly reprinted in this comprehensive publication by and about conceptual artist Braco Dimitrijević. His works are accompanied by accessible commentary by leading critics and curators, including Nicolas Bourriaud, Dan Cameron, Lóránd Hegyi, Jean-Hubert Martin, Catherine Millet, Achille Bonito Oliva, and others, as well as extensive reproductions of the artist’s visual works and installations, in particular his ongoing Casual Passer-By series (1971-). Working furtively in urban spaces saturated with messages of advertising and cultural industry, the artist hopes to transform and restructure the meaning of public images by inhabiting and defunctionalizing them. As with his work in general, he seeks to create another space, a counter-model to dominant thought, one that creates not just a reversal in meaning but also a rupture in perception.”

Edited by Aaron Levy
Publisher Slought Books, Philadelphia, and University of Pennsylvania, 2009
Contemporary Theory series, 3
ISBN 9780981540955
263 pages

Publisher

PDF (6 MB, from publisher)

Larry Shiner: The Invention of Art: a Cultural History (2001)

“With The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention—that the lines drawn between art and craft resulted from key social transformations in Europe during the long eighteenth century.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2001
ISBN 0226753425, 9780226753423
xix+362 pages

Interview (Platypus Review, 2014)
Review: Mitch Avila (JAAC 2003).
Commentary: Luis Puelles Romero (Contrastes ES 2005), David Clowney (Contemporary Aesthetics 2008).

Wikipedia
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (18 MB, updated on 2023-5-19)