Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (review)

There is no modernity without coloniality. Hence there are two critiques of modernity, one internal (postmodernism, deconstruction), the other coming from the colonies. Postmodernism would remain Eurocentric without a counteracting postcoloniality—without the subaltern rationality that Mignolo sees emerging at the border of modernity/coloniality (especially in the Americas). Beside the deconstruction of Western metaphysics is a parallel, border project of epistemic decolonization, which for Mignolo includes a decolonized scholarship. Imagine a world where scholarship in Arabic or Catalan is as cutting edge as the stuff from today's elite Western intellectual centers. Mignolo gives the impression that it is just a matter of time before this circumstance emerges—that it is brewing and bubbling on the borders of the postcolonial world, a telos of subaltern reason as unstoppable as Civilization or Progress or Enlightenment or Globalization, since it is the vengeance of their common dark side.