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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Diana Taylor with Lorie Novak (eds.): Dancing with the Zapatistas: Twenty Years Later (2014)

“Dancing with the Zapatistas brings together scholars, artists, journalists, and activists to respond to the continuing work of the Zapatistas twenty years after their insurrection in 1994. Available online, this open access multimedia digital book includes essays, photo essays, interviews, and spoken word and theatrical performances that offer insights into the workings of the Zapatista Council on Good Government; the murals in the Caracoles; the Escuelita; Subcomandante Marcos; and Zapatista music and celebrations. The book discusses how Zapatista and Mayan thought permeate the daily life of the Zapatistas, from the way in which their languages configure collective identity to how music affirms the Zapatistas’ conception of history. Ultimately, Dancing with the Zapatistas considers how the Zapatistas work with those outside their movement while covering how they have influenced the practices of activists and artists around the globe.”

Contributors: Brian Batchelor, Henry Castillo, Elvira Colorado, Hortencia Colorado, María Luisa de la Garza, Ricardo Dominguez, Jennifer Flores Sternad Ponce de León, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Marta Molina, Lorie Novak, Julio Pantoja, Claudia Isabel Serrano Otero, Jacques Servin (a.k.a. Andy Bichlbaum), Alexei Taylor, Diana Taylor, Luis Vargas-Santiago, Moysés Zuñiga.

Publisher Duke University Press, with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, 2014
Open access
via Gabriella Coleman

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Will Bradley, Charles Esche (eds.): Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader (2007)

“The desire to change the world has often led artists to align themselves with wider social movements and to break with established institutions of art. This reader gathers together an international selection of artists’ proposals, manifestos, theoretical texts and public declarations that focus on the question of political engagement and the possibility of social change. The approaches represented are many and diverse, from Gustave Courbet’s involvement in the Paris Commune and the socialist art theory of William Morris to the hybrid activist practice associated with the twenty-first century ‘movement of movements’; from the political commitments of the Modernist avant-gardes to the rejections of Modernism in favour of protest, critique, utopian social experiment or revolutionary propaganda. Six specially commissioned essays – by Geeta Kapur, Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina Vishmidt and Tirdad Zolghadr – further explore both the historical context and the contemporary situation.”

Publisher Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, London, 2007
ISBN 9781854376268
479 pages

Commentary: Marco Deseriis and Brian Holmes (Mute).

Publisher
WorldCat

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