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The Darker Side of Western Modernity

Walter Mignolo

Decolonial theory

It is a central statement of decolonial theory and its project of epistemic delinking from Western universals.

Synopsis

Mignolo argues that Western modernity and colonial domination are two sides of one coin, and that decolonial thinking must delink from its categories.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

There is no modernity without coloniality; the prosperity and progress of the West were built on the dispossession and silencing of colonized peoples.

It refuses to treat colonial violence as an excess of modernity, insisting it is modernity's hidden foundation.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment?.

Reading note

Read it as theory aimed at shifting the geography of knowledge, not as a narrative history.

Best paired with

Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment?

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