The Darker Side of Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options
Walter D Mignolo
2012, Duke University Press
408 pages
IT IS DENSE, but refreshing and ultimately uplifting. Walter Mignolo’s visionary ideas about the decline and fall of (Western) modernity and hence leadership should be on the syllabus in schools, let alone higher education institutions. Decant out the main theme and what you have is futurism: a prediction of how “dewesternisation” is disinheriting the corrupt West of its God-given right to lead and how “decoloniality” is imagining new global futures in which the relentless hunger for wealth, with all the damage that it causes, could become a thing of the past. This view has a potent allure, particularly the notion of our communal futures with which Mignolo concludes his weighty text. And he has genuinely been testing the limits of modern social thought in his efforts to “break the Western code” embedded in coloniality. Trust an Argentine semiotician to come up with such a vision. – EC
