Chapter 4 - About the Colonial Difference or the Emergence of Thinking That Was Not Considered to Be Thinking: A Conversation with Walter D. Mignolo

Summary

About Formative Stages.

FGH: What are the fundamental stages in your education? What early biographical data would you like to include?

WM: They are all important. I begin with primary and secondary. I should mention a small place in Argentina, Corral de Bustos, and then the Universidad Nacional in Cordoba from 1961 to 1962 until 1968. I started studying philosophy there. I passed through anthropology and ended up completing modern languages. In 1969, I obtained a fellowship and I went to France to complete my graduate studies in semiology and literary theory. I completed my PhD in France in 1974 and then I quit studying (laughter).

FGH: You came to the U.S. in 1974?

WM: Yes. I finished [my studies] and I came here. I came before finishing for a bit, but it is unimportant.

FGH: What are the periods in your intellectual training? Initially, I would mention three: the structural-semiologist “French” Mignolo, although you no longer publicize this period too much. I confess I do not know it well […]

WM: This first period is already gone, although I still like, with the benefit of the distance, the writing of my doctoral dissertation, which two years later, generated the first book. It is the semiological period, discourse analysis and literary theory. I was writing this sort of thing until 1986-1987, although there is already a period in 1980-1981, in which I publish an article “Cartas, Crónicas y Relaciones” [“Letters, Chronicles, Narration”] in which I begin to go into the colonial question. But I do so not through colonialism, but in relation to the question, “What was history like and what was it like to write about it in the XVI century in relation to Western Indies (“Indias Occidentales”)”? This was 1981. And this took me to write the book The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization [orig. 1995 (Second edition 2003)]. But first things first: I wrote three books in my semiological period, focusing on literary theory and discourse analysis: Elements for a theory of the literary text [Elementos para una teoría del texto literario] in 1978, Modern Text and Metaphor [Texto Moderno y Metáfora] in 1984 and Textual Theory and Textual Interpretation [Teoría del Texto e Interpretación del Texto] in 1986.