Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, Mar. 2007, pp. 449–514.
This was a long and difficult read (exacerbated by a particularly high pollen count yesterday that made it hard for me to focus!). I'm not sure I can do this article justice in a summary, but the main thing that I came away from it with was the idea that the Western European experience of modernity (in both its historical and its epistemic forms) should not be taken as a universal experience through which other places should understand their own experiences. Part (a main part) of the reason for that is probably how the whole development of modernity grew out of colonialism (which involved the "discovery" and occupation of the "New World" and the slavery and genocide that was part of that colonialism). This is certainly not a compete summary or synopsis of the article, but it was the "center of gravity" of the article, as I take it.
A few lot of quotes from the article that I found useful and/or confusing:
"Modern rationality is an engulfing and at the same time defensive and exclusionary. It is not the case, Quijano added, that in non-European imperial languages and epistemologies (Mandarin, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Aymara, etc.), the notion of Totality doesn’t exist or is unthinkable. But it is the case that, particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology (from Theo-logy to secular Ego-logy (e.g., Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am’), non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a growing imperial concept of Totality." (p. 451)
"I am observing that from 1500 on, Ottomans, Incas, Russians, Chinese, etc., moved toward and inverted ‘recognition’: they had to ‘recognize’ that Western languages and categories of thoughts, and therefore, political philosophy and political economy, were marching an expanding without ‘recognizing’ them as equal players in the game." (p. 451)
"De-coloniality starts from other sources. From the de-colonial shift already implicit in Nueva corónica and buen gobierno by Waman Puma de Ayala; in the de-colonial critique and activism of Mahatma Gandhi; in the fracture of Marxism in its encounter with colonial legacies in the Andes, articulated by José Carlos Mariátegui; in the radical political and epistemological shifts enacted by Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy." (p. 452)
"‘New inter-cultural communication’ should be interpreted as new inter-epistemic communication (as we will see bellow, is the case of the concept of inter-culturality among Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador). Furthermore, de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity (body politics), located in a specific part of the planet (geo-politics), that is, Europe where capitalism accumulated as a consequence of colonialism. De-linking then shall be understood as a de-colonial epistemic shift leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a universal project." (p. 453)
"To de-link from the colonial matrix of power and the logic of coloniality embedded in la pensee [sic?] unique, it is necessary to engage in border epistemology and in alternatives TO modernity or in a the global and diverse project of transmodernity." (p. 456)
"Emancipation and liberation are indeed two sides of the same coin, the coin of modernity/coloniality." (p. 457)
"the geo-politics of knowledge names the historical location (space and time, the historical marks and configuration of a space and a place, etc.) and authority of loci of enunciations that had been negated by the dominance and hegemony of both the theo-logical and ego-logical politics of knowledge and understanding." (p. 460) (I think I understand this...)
In relation to Guaman (Waman) Poma (Puma)'s Nueva Corónica: "The missionary arguments w[e]re simple: these people do not have alphabetic writing, therefore they cannot have history because for a Renaissance man of the sixteenth century, history was irretrievably linked to alphabetic writing in the Greco-Latin tradition (not Hebrew or Arabic or even Cirylic [sic], of course)." (461) (My comment: Candidius thought this about the Sirayans he was working with/on, too. In fact, he made the same argument in relation to the idea that they could be easily converted to Christianity because their lack of a writing system meant that their knowledge of their religion was hard to be carried on from generation to generation.)
"In other words, de-linking could hardly be thought out from a Marxist perspective, because Marxism offers a different content but not a different logic. The epistemic locations for de-linking comes from the emergence of the geo- and body-politics of knowledge), of which Waman Puma shall become the reference point of all subsequent projects." (p. 462)
"The rhetoric of modernity works through the imposition of ‘salvation’, whether as Christianity, civilization, modernization and development after WWII or market democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union." (p. 463)
"One may wonder, for instance, what people in the Islamic world or in China or India thought about racial classification in the West as it was being elaborated since the sixteenth century. Most likely, they were not aware that they were being classified and what consequential role they would have in the order of thing that was being articulated in Western structures, principles and institutions of knowledge. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the entire globe is responding in one way or another to Western racial classification." (p. 480) (He cites Amy Chua, of all people, on this! "The interesting anecdote of Bolivian candidate to Miss Universe, from Santa Cruz (El Nacional, The Economist), is revealing of the fact that the racism and the colonial matrix of power persist in Bolivia after 500 years, now integrated to new for of racial violence generated by market economy (Amy Chua 2003)" (p. 509, n. 66). I'm not sure what that "interesting anecdote" is, though...)
"In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem." (p. 488) (I sort of get this...? I only wonder how far this argument can be taken...)
"Anzaldúa’s clear-cut, ‘they are not helping us but following our lead’, is the basic claim that established the foundation of the geo-politics (e.g., Third World perspective) and the body-politics (e.g., post-civil rights consciousness in USA: women and men of color, gay and lesbians) from where an identity based on politics (and not a politics based on identity) emerged." (p. 492) (I think here he's saying that what people criticize as "identity politics" should be seen as an "identity based on politics"?)
"Border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories (colonial and imperial like Russia and the Ottoman empires) and corresponding subjectivities." (p. 493)
"We are not, of course, looking to retrieve an authentic knowledge from Chinese, Arabic or Aymara; but, rather, we want to include the perspective and in the foundation of knowledge subjectivities that have been subjected in and by the colonial matrix of power. The diversity of actual manifestations and practices of border thinking make up what I have described as an-other paradigm." (p. 493) (Note sure I get this point.)
"There is, of course, nothing wrong in the fact that a given group of people put forward its own cosmovision. The problem arises when a limited number of people feel they are appointed by God to bring (their) good to the rest of the humanity. That is, as Quijano puts it, ‘the provincial pretense to universality’." (p. 493)
"Western expansion includes the good, the bad and the ugly, although the ‘good’ in its various forms, it is a consequence of the bad and the ugly, as we are witnessing today in Iraq: first you destroy a country, then you provide help and promote reconstruction, third you promote freedom and democracy, and four you crash Islamic thinkers who would like to reconstruct Iraq and write the constitution on the basis of sharia and the Q’uran and not on the bases of the democracy and the Bible." (p. 496)
"Then, am I proposing a sort of ‘cultural relativism’ with its rhetoric of ‘let me alone in my place’? Well, not exactly." (p. 497)
"Still, the universalization of the regional is one consequence of Western imperial/colonial expansion. As a result, each local history of the planet, today, has to deal with the modern/colonial world, the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality. Each local history has its own language, memory, ethics, political theory, and political economy (as we have been witnessing daily in Iraq since March 2003 when the ‘mission accomplished’ statement was proffered in Washington), all of which are also marked by traces of the local in the relations of domination and exploitation within Western knowledge. The ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectations’ are di-verse, or rather, pluri-verse what each diverse local history has in common with others is the fact that they all have to deal with the unavoidable presence of the modern/ colonial world and its power differentials, which start with racial classification and end up ranking the planet (e.g., First, Second and Third World was a racialization of politics, economy, cultures and knowledge). Thus, the pluri-versality of each local history and its narrative of decolonization can connect through that common experience and use it as the basis for a new common logic of knowing: border thinking." (p. 497)
"Decolonizing knowledge and being from the perspective of Japan’s or Russian’s colonies will be quite different from the perspective of England’s colonies. In the first two cases, decolonization from the epistemic and existential conditions imposed by Japanese and Russian languages leaves still another layer to deal with, which is the epistemic and epistemic conditions growingly imposed world wide by Greco-Latin and the six vernacular imperial languages of Western empires. That is, Japanese and Russian languages and categories of thought became subordinated to the hegemony of Western epistemology and its imperial and global reach." (p. 498) (Not entirely sure I understand this, although I think I get the general idea.)
"Thus, border thinking becomes the necessary critical method for the political and ethical project of filling in the gaps and revealing the imperial complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality." (p. 499)
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OK, that's enough for now. I need to get on to another article now.
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