Where did racism come from - and where does it still live today? How can we unthink racism?
 
This lecture will describe racism and link it to the emergence of capitalism in the sixteenth century. In that century, racism as we know it today emerged as a crucial component of the rhetoric of imperial modernity (civilization, progress, development, free market, democracy) that still is in place in our own time (e.g., the discourse about the invasion and democratizaton of Iraq, and the more recent about the end of poverty and the development of Sub-Saharan AFrica). Prof. Mignolo will present the de-colonial (not the post-colonial) reason as the de-colonial state of mind that crosses modern/colonial history from Waman Puma in colonial Peru, Mahatma Gandhi in colonial India, Frantz Fanon in colonial French Caribbean and North Africa and Gloria Anzaldua in U.S. internal colonialism.

Professor Mignolo is currently teaching an undergraduate seminar entitled " Why Hispanics are not White: Globalization and Latinidad." He is the academic director of Duke in the Andes, an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean Studies in La Paz, Bolivia, at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and the Universidad Católica Boliviana. He has also taught at the Université de Toulouse, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan.

Walter's research focuses on global coloniality and the history of capitalism. His publications include Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamérica and the Andes (1994; coedited with Elizabeth Hill Boone), The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton U.P., 2000), and the Spanish-language collection Capitalismo y Geopolitica del Conocimiento: la Filosofia de la Liberacion en el Debate Intelectual Contemporaneo (Buenos Aires, 2001; edited with introduction).

One of Walter's most recent project is the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. 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. Professor Mignolo has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador.