Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #5: latin america 153
Latin American–based critique of European and U.S. cultural studies traditions,
even though he is a well-known and distinguished professor at a
prestigious North American university.
Mignolo critiques the notion of European or U.S. singularity by insisting
that Western civilization, for all the benefi ts it has bestowed on the planet,
has engaged in colonialism, racism, and genocide. He argues that it is necessary
to look at Western civilization from the perspective of the “border,”
that is, from Latin America, Asia, or Africa, or those places that have been
subjected to the darker side of U.S. and European history. This allows for
“border thinking,” Mignolo’s term for a new philosophical tradition that
draws upon Western and non-Western perspectives and recognizes the limits
and possibilities of both. He also refers to this new way of thinking as
“gnosis,” a term borrowed from African philosophical traditions.
Reminiscent of Stuart Hall, Mignolo stresses the importance of place
and of defi ning one’s place as the starting point for discussing identity. He
defi nes one’s place as “local history.” It is from the perspective of our local
histories, our particular places, he argues, that we are in position to question
the assumed truths of large-scale metanarratives—like Western civilization
being the source of progress, liberty, and rationality in the world. Mignolo
refers to metanarratives of Western superiority as “global designs” and contends
that these designs are often imposed on Latin America. Mignolo looks
at an alternative historical experience to question the presumed validity of
global designs—the three hundred years of Spanish colonialism and the two
hundred years of neocolonial endeavors by other European powers and the
United States. Mignolo refers to this imperial history as “coloniality.”
Like Hall, Mignolo does not privilege or essentialize local history. Instead
he posits it as a useful position of criticism. To paraphrase Mignolo’s
general argument, the perspective of local history allows us to deconstruct
global designs and come to a new position of knowledge which resides at
the border of the global and the local, which draws upon both and privileges
neither.
Mignolo acknowledges the tremendous infl uence and importance of
the theories of postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and
world systems, among others, that are embodied in the works of Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Immanuel
Wallerstein. But he insists that these scholars and the intellectual positions
they have spawned fail to take into account the experience of places like
Latin America, which is on the border of the global. Therefore, he calls the
cultural studies tradition a “Euro-centric critique of Euro-centrism.” It is
in this regard that Mignolo echoes the Latin Americanist critique of the