Toward a De-Colonial Common Sense

Abstract

Toward a De-Colonial Common Sense The Darker Side of Western Modernity, by Walter D. Mignolo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458 pages. $94.95 hardback, $27.95 paperback.Since 1970s, Latin Americanists such as Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo have articulated de-colonial theory as a response to historical crises resulting from project of Western modernity in global South. Contributing to cultural theory and to concept of coloniality-the negative underside and constitutive component of modernity-de-colonial thinkers attempt to recuperate and reassert power of subjugated knowledges that continue to resist and struggle against modernity's onslaught of destructive effects (e.g., capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, globalization, neoliberalism, racism, classism, etc). By continuing to developing themes present in his related work, Walter D. Mignolo's The Darker Side of Western Modernity oudines a theoretical de-colonial project by mapping out historical provenances of contemporary global social, cultural, political, and economic problems and contradictions (read: afterlives of dependency and neocolonialism), providing frameworks and connections to comprehend and productively move beyond constraints of present toward a radical future through what he terms de-linking, or decolonization (122-23).Mignolo provides different avenues, or options, for thinking through de-coloniality as an antithetical method fundamentally opposed to Western modernity. In doing so, The Darker Side of Western Modernity implores us to take into consideration once inhabited subjugated knowledges such as those of indigenous and marginalized subgroups that continue to exist in Americas long after initial brutality of colonial contact and incorporation of Latin America into world system. In taking seriously resistance efforts of indigenous peoples of Americas and around world by following their intellectual and cosmological insights, Mignolo indicates that Western modernity and its underlying structure, the colonial matrix of power, will be problematized, disputed, and ultimately dismantled through sustained epistemic disobedience by assertion and preservation of those of that necessarily go against reigning forms and institutions of modernity (143-44). These ways of knowing express themselves in many forms, such as body politics, geopolitics, and, following philosopher Enrique Dussel, through an ethics of liberation that posits a radical mode of thinking that challenges and disavows central philosophies, values, and worldviews composing Western modernity as dominant planetary logic.1 Calling for an alternative to coloniality, Mignolo proposes that we reject Western universalisms that reflect and reproduce Eurocentrism in favor of what he calls pluriversality, that is, a new common logic advancing border thinking: a global social solidarity and cultural identification beyond ethnic and regional boundaries (293-94).Composing a part of his larger theoretical system, Mignolo lays bare his chief problematic in The Darker Side through an interrogation of globally shared capitalist economy that, following Anibal Quijano, is described as the colonial matrix of power. This matrix is at once created and controlled by Western imperial countries and disrupted by non-Western nation-states such as China, Russia, some Islamic countries, India, and select South American countries.2 Describing colonial matrix of power as dependent, obscured, and constitutive component of Western modernity represented by Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, England, and United States, Mignolo prompts us to begin thinking about this colonial matrix as being principal terrain responsible for current and future reconfiguration of economics, consciousness, and cognition (xvii). The concept of colonial matrix allows Mignolo to theoretically understand shifting, destruction, and syncretism of pre-Columbian modes of thought and of living that, while different from those implied in project of Western modernity, maintain validity and persist within present neoliberal moment. …