Walter Mignolo
Encyclopedia
Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 semiotician (Ecoles des Hautes Etudes) and professor at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, who has published extensively on semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...

 and literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

, made up over a dozen new words, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality.

Work

Mignolo received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse
University of Toulouse
The Université de Toulouse is a consortium of French universities, grandes écoles and other institutions of higher education and research, named after one of the earliest universities established in Europe in 1229, and including the successor universities to that earlier university...

, Indiana, and Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

.

Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies.

Mignolo co-edits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of "Duke in the Andes", an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito
Quito
San Francisco de Quito, most often called Quito , is the capital city of Ecuador in northwestern South America. It is located in north-central Ecuador in the Guayllabamba river basin, on the eastern slopes of Pichincha, an active stratovolcano in the Andes mountains...

, Ecuador, at the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana. Since 2000, he has directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...

 in Quito, Ecuador.

Publications

His publications include The Idea of Latin America (2005), which was awarded the Frantz Fanon Prize for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thoughts by The Caribbean Philosophical Association
Caribbean Philosophical Association
The Caribbean Philosophical Association is a philosophical organization founded in 2002 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies, in Mona, Jamaica. The founding members were George Belle, B. Anthony Bogues, Patrick Goodin, Lewis Gordon, Clevis Headley, Paget Henry,...

 in 2006; Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, co-edited with Elizabeth H. Boone (1994); and The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995) which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...

. He is also author of Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999) and editor of Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intellectual contemporanáneo (2000) and The Americas: Loci of Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions (1994-95). His current interests include colonial expansion and nation building at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

In collaboration with Arturo Escobar, he edited a special issue of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

on "Globalization and the Decolonial Option."

Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics," writing on artists Pedro Lasch
Pedro Lasch
Pedro Lasch is a visual artist born in Mexico City, and based in the U.S. since 1994. He produces works of conceptual art, institutional critique, social practice, and site-specific art, as well as paintings, photographs, prints, and works in traditional media. He has been regularly involved with...

, Fred Wilson (artist)
Fred Wilson (artist)
Conceptual artist Fred Wilson describes himself as of "African, Native American, European and Amerindian" descent. Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2003. Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo in 1992 and the...

, and Tanja Ostojić
Tanja Ostojic
Tanja Ostojić is a Serbian feminist performance artist.-The "EU Panties":In December 2005, Ostojić became well known in Europe as a result of the "EU Panties" poster, a satire of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde. Ostojić's version displayed her own crotch, clothed in blue underwear complete...

. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch
Pedro Lasch
Pedro Lasch is a visual artist born in Mexico City, and based in the U.S. since 1994. He produces works of conceptual art, institutional critique, social practice, and site-specific art, as well as paintings, photographs, prints, and works in traditional media. He has been regularly involved with...

, edited by Lasch, published by Duke University Press
Duke University Press
Duke University Press is an academic publisher of books and journals, and a unit of Duke University. It publishes approximately 120 books annually and more than 40 journals, as well as offering five electronic collections...

.

External links

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