Local Histories/Global Designs
Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

Explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which author calls "border thinking". This title expands the horizons of debates under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America.

"Local Histories/Global Designs" is an extended argument about the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative Latin American and Latino scholars. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. He explores the crucial notion of "colonial difference" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which he calls "border thinking". Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis", or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. In a new preface that discusses "Local Histories/Global Designs" as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System
PART ONE: IN SEARCH OF AN OTHER LOGIC
Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference
PART TWO: I AM WHERE I THINK: THE GEOPOLITICS
OF KNOWLEDGE AND COLONIAL EPISTEMIC DIFFERENCES
Post-Occidental Reason: The Crisis of Occidentalism and the Emergenc(y)e of Border
Thinking
Human Understanding and Local Interests: Occidentalism and the (Latin) American
Argument
Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial? The Politics and Sensibilities
of Geohistorical Locations
PART THREE: SUBALTERNITY AND THE COLONIAL
DIFFERENCE: LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND KNOWLEDGES
"An Other Tongue": Linguistics Maps,
Literary Geographies, Cultural Landscapes
Bilanguaging Love: Thinking in between
Languages
Globalization/Mundializacion: Civilizing
Processes and the Relocation of Languages and Knowledges
Afterword An Other Tongue, An Other Thinking,
An Other Logic
Bibliography
Index