"Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowing: A Decolonial View of the Humanities"

Friday, April 23, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Gale VandeBerg Auditorium, 121 Pyle Center,
702 Langdon Street

Sponsored by the department of Spanish and Portuguese of UW-Madison
and the Institute for Research in the Humanities,
with financial support from the Hilldale Fund.

A reception will immediately follow the talk just outside the auditorium.

Walter D. Mignolo
William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies; Professor of Cultural Anthropology; Spanish & Latin American Studies, Duke University

The history of the Western University from the Renaissance to the Corporate University at the beginning of the 21st century, went hand in hand with the consolidation, hegemony and expansion of Western European imperial countries, followed up by the leadership of the US. Thus, knowledge in the West became an industry, pushing us to living to know instead of knowing to live, while at the same time devaluating and undermining all knowledges that do not conform the norms and the rules of theology. The Humanities have been, and continue to be, involved in that process. The Western distinction between “humantitas” and “anthrops” is a case in point. Thus, while the Humanities were since its inception Eurocentered and complicit with imperial colonialism, could we envision de-colonial projects within the Humanities at large in their Western history and its global present? Professor Mignolo will offer some answers to this question by focusing on “Amawtay Wasi. Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indigenas” in Quito, and on “Universidad de la Tierra” in Oaxaca and San Cristobal de Las Casas.

Walter Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Before coming to Duke in January, 1993, he taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan. He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in the past years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and di/pluriversalities. His current interests include colonial expansion and nation building at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Professor Mignolo is the academic director of Duke in the Andes, an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana.