The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures. Decolonial Options by Walter D. Mignolo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures. Decolonial Options by Walter D. Mignolo Sara Castro-Klarén Walter D. Mignolo , The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures. Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 408 pp. In The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Walter Mignolo performs a series of theoretical moves that allow his inquiry into how we got to be the way we are, to both continue with his critique of Western epistemological practices gathered in his earlier The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) and also delve further into the global/local considerations engaged in his Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000). In the two later books, Mignolo emphasizes, explains and expands on critiques of the modernity/coloniality matrix of power-knowledge that stems from the thinking of intellectuals situated in the living-thinking conditions peculiar to Latin America's heterogeneous cultural formations. The title of this latest book addresses a growing awareness on the need to think less and less in terms that universalize, globalize or blanket different colonialities into a uniform post-colonial experience. The emphasis on the "Western" aspect of modernity recognizes the validity of the arguments advanced by the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro as well as the Indian historian Partha Chatergee on behalf of the notion of [End Page 467] heterogeneous and diss-similar modernities which emerged from different periods of the modernity/coloniality matrix. Further, The Darker Side of Western Modernity involves a double consideration. On the one hand it examines the European discourses that, even in the hands of radical thinkers such as Kant in his anthropology, relied nevertheless on the idea of an "other" as primitive and extraneous to modern (Euro) civilization. On the other hand, this book on Western Modernity assumes that such a historical period has run its course and that "9/11/2001" constitutes an iconic and real watershed in the (now) general course of human affairs in the globe. Thus, much of the thinking in this book is destined to examine new ways of conceiving a world order that in some manner need to be global but which in most other ways can or must only be local. This is in as much as the corporate globalization (a new universal) of human endeavors did in fact bring about the debacle of Wall Street in 2007. That event in and of itself raises fundamental questions regarding the future of capital or Western modernity. In this regard, Mignolo's contention and point of departure for much of the section of the book on decolonial options seems to coincide with main stream thinking about the meaning of the meltdown in 2007. Robert Samuelson, writing in his column in the Washington Post on June 25, 2012, states that "We live in a world of broken models. To understand why world leaders can't easily fix the sputtering global economy, you have to realize that the economic models on which the United States, Europe and China relied, are collapsing." If we see the book in temporal terms, the seven chapters together with the "Introduction" and "Afterword" move in the form of an arch. Mignolo opens his line of argumentation with an expansive and richly theoretical discussion of Anibal Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power. Here Mignolo sharpens, empowers and enriches the critical capabilities of the "coloniality of power" and in doing so offers the reader a thinking strategy capable of dismantling most of the few impregnable walls still left in Euro-American imperial thinking. The high point of the arch could be considered the two respective chapters on Kant and Carl Schmitt. The whole of the arch spans over five hundred years of Western political thought and comes to rest on the side of a search for new epistemes (emphasis on the plural) that may be capable of privileging the Andean ancestral practices of communal living or Sumac Kawsay, that is to say, the political philosophy of the ayllu on living well (64, 306-12). Arriving at the point in the book where the reader is more or less open to consider the validity of the political...