Walter Mignolo and Border Thinking

Walter Mignolo, born in 1941 in Córdoba, Argentina, trained in semiotics in Paris under the influence of Algirdas Julien Greimas before building his academic career in the United States, where he has long held the William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professorship at Duke University. His early major book, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 1995), examined how the technologies of alphabetic literacy, book production, and cartography that Europeans celebrated as achievements of Renaissance humanism were simultaneously instruments of territorial control and epistemic domination in the colonization of the Americas, reframing the "Renaissance" itself as inseparable from the colonial violence occurring at the same historical moment.