From Nepantla to Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise

One phase of our project is coming to an end, and another is beginning. With this issue, which closes the journal's fourth volume, Nepantla: Views from South ceases publication. Simultaneously, we are creating a new Web site, with a new name, that we hope will provide a broader, and in some sense perhaps more radical forum.

In the first issue of this volume (4.1), we described the new direction in which Nepantla will be heading ("An Other Globalization: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitanism"). To what we said there, it should be added that the new direction will be reinforced by a change of title: Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise better describes the project the coeditors and the editorial collective have in mind.¹ We are not of course denying either the title, Nepantla, or the subtitle, Views from South. On the contrary, as we argued in the editorial note of Nepantla 1.1, quoting Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "the South [is] a metaphor ‘for global suffering under global capitalism'" (Mignolo 2000, 2). We are committed to the geopolitical implications of "the South" but want now to stress a critical cosmopolitan (post-Kantian and pluriversal) project and orientation that resonates with the Zapatistas' goal of creating "a world in which many worlds coexist" as well as in the motto of the World Social Forum, "An other world is possible." Such a project could not be aspired to within the monotopical or universal cosmology often referred to as "Occidentalism" or "modernity." It needs to open up to languages beyond the Occident and beyond modernity, to other knowledges, to other worlds that will, of necessity, enter into conflictive dialogue with the hegemony of Occidentalism. In this regard, nepantla and nepantilism are concepts implied in the very notions of Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise.

But in the transit from Nepantla: Views from South to Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, there is more than a shift in the intellectual project. There will also be a radical change in the format and in the institutional location. Nepantla will draw to a close as a journal, and Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise will come into view and materialize as a Web dossier. While initially Nepantla was associated primarily with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, at Duke University, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise will be housed at the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies (also at Duke). As with the change of title, the change of institutional location doesn't deny or reject the former home. On the contrary, it implies a broadening of the horizons, in which Latin American studies will remain incorporated in the larger spectrum of interdisciplinarity, of international nodes and a radicalization of the humanities in order to meet head-on the challenges of pluriversality at a moment in which the dominant tendency is toward the imposition of a homogenous cosmology, toward a controlled globalization that denies the needs and possibilities of building a dialogic and critically cosmopolitan world. Starting in the spring of 2004, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise will be available at www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko.

We would like to thank all those who have contributed to Nepantla, whether as authors or subscribers. We hope you will join with us in this next phase of our journey. Inquiries about Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise may be e-mailed to Mindy H. Quigley at mindy.hohenstein@duke.edu.

Endnote

1. The editorial collective of Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise includes, in addition to executive coeditors Walter D. Mignolo and Gabriela Nouzeilles, Teresa Berger, Leo Ching, Romand Coles, Roberto Dainotto, Arturo Escobar, Sibylle Fischer, Andrea Giunta, William Hart, Ranjana Khanna, Ralph Litzinger, Wahneema Lubiano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ebrahim Moosa, Janice Radway, José David Saldívar, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and Robyn Weigman.

Reference

Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. "Introduction: From Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern...