Mignolo, Darker Side

24) Mignolo, Walter. 2003. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

The Darker Side of Renaissance is a book in the post colonial literature on Latin America as Mignolo makes a number of provocative arguments challenging common place assumptions about the colonization of the new world. He points to: 1) The centrality of knowledge in the production of colonial power over the new world, that the prominence of written language over native American forms of literacy was a political construction rather than an given superiority of one register over other. 2) That the registering information as act of selection but mostly of the production of an episteme of knowledge to be considered valuable was other dimension of the political domination. 3) That the colonization of space was not just a military action but also a projection of a spatial logic making space as a locus of a particular knowledge (systematized through maps). 4) That modernity, with its implications of nation state formation an capitalist accumulation, but also as the production of a negative other as a necessary part of the self, can be located as starting in the Reniassance and in the colonization of the Americas rather than in the 18th century. To do this he takes a variety of sources and methods: from literary and semiotic analysis, historiographic research, to a reflection over the production of maps. In regards o space he analyzes the “struggles between coexisting territorial representations during the economic and religious expansion of West” even when this co-existence was silenced by the Spanish. In regards to the representation of space he points that “the owner of the centre does not depend of the necessarily on geometric rationalization but, on the contrary, that geometric rationalizations are enacted around the power of the ethnic centre. (223). For him the efficacy of western cartography cannot be measured in terms of truth as a correlation between the representation and the world, but rather in its political efficiency: Europeans are in a capacity to impose their perspective as they were the powerful side of economic expansion, and also as they were able to impose the logic of representation, even when European cartographers would concede an ethnic centre of the map that is non-European one. He thus characterizes fissures between notions of time and space. A cosmological and religious concept of time separated from the one of business and administration, and a concept of space linked to the body, the community and one attached to geometric projection (226). Along all the book Mignolo points how the logic of a more evolved Europe that allowed its colonial supremacy, is a construction that needs to be criticized not just in the name of cultural relativism but to understand the way political power was created through the coloniality of knowledge that subordinated native intellectuals and their productions.