ABOUT THE SPEAKER

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY Seminar Series

In Conversation with Walter Mignolo: The Failures of

Neoliberalism and the Roads to the Future
DATE: 4 APRIL 2012, WEDNESDAY
VENUE: AS7 AUDITORIUM, BLOCK AS7, #01-02

TIME: 3.00 PM
CHAIR: PROFESSOR CHUA BENG HUAT

SPEAKER: PROFESSOR WALTER D. MIGNOLO

William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor and
Director, Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University
ABSTRACT
The failure of neo-liberalism as the last attempt of the modern/colonial world order and
global designs, to homogenize the globe precipitated what was unavoidable after 250
years of Western Civilization building and 250 of hegemony. Western Civilization is the
youngest of all civilizations on the planet. Its foundation started with the Renaissance
and found itself at the pick in the second half of the eighteenth century. An emerging
ethno-class took over in a series of revolutions (Glorious Revolution, American
Revolution, French Revolution) and above all, the Industrial Revolution.

Walter D. Mignolo is William H.

Wannamaker Distinguished Professor
and Director of the Center for Global
Studies and the Humanities at Duke
University. He is also Visiting Fellow at
the Advanced Institute for Cross
Disciplinary Studies, City University of
Hong Kong (January-June 2012). Among
his major works are The Darker Side of
The Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality
and Colonization (1995), which received
the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from
the Modern Languages Association of
America in 1996, and Local
histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,
Subaltern Knowledge and Border
Thinking (2000). The Idea of Latin
America (2005) received the Frantz
Fanon Award from the Caribbean
Philosophical Association in 2006. The
Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global
Futures, Decolonial Options was just
released in December of 2011.

The world before 1500 (that is, before Western Civilization) was polycentric and noncapitalist. Western imperial expansion created the conditions for a polycentric and
capitalist world order which is the one we are already living in. One of the big questions
we can ask ourselves is: what are the roads to the future. I see three major global
designs in the making: re-westernization, which is the project of Barack Obama since his
first day as President (c.f.: his discourse in Cairo and the recent declaration of the 21st
Century as the American Pacific Century); dewesternization, a tendency with two
trajectories: the secular politico-economic dewesternization lead by East Asian states
and intellectuals and now being joined by African and Latin American countries; and the
politico-religious dewesternization that we can find in countries with a predominant
Muslim population from Iran to Malaysia and Indonesia; and decoloniality, a tendency
that was announced by Sukarno in the Bandung Conference, that unfolded in Africa,
South America and the Caribbean and that, today, it is the project of the political society
rather than States or Institutionalized Religions that more often than not tend to prevent
the unfolding of the political society. Neither to say, none of this tendencies are
homogeneous and fixed in one place. But they can be clearly distinguished as three
main designs of the roads to the future.
For queries, please e-mail the seminar convenor Dr. Daniel Goh: socgohd@nus.edu.sg.