In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination
of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century
to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination
of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric
thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and
being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications
modernity globalization and cosmopolitanism placing them all within the framework of
coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global
South and the Global East Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of
decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and
subjectivities. The urgent task Mignolo stresses is the epistemic reconstitution of
categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western
civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West
and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo
underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations in and outside the
academy to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge ways of knowing and praxes of living.
