Wikipedia: Walter D. Mignolo (born May 1, 1941) is an Argentine semiotician (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and professor at Duke University who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.[1]

DFTP - Conclusion:

In The Darker Side of Western Modernity, the decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo (2011) identifies five global trajectories that, in his view, shape possi­ble ­futures: de-­Westernization, re-­Westernization, re­orientations of the Left, spiritual options, and decolonial options. The latter two can be seen as “roads to re-­existence delinking from the belief that development and modernity are the only way to the f­uture” (64). Which ­future prevails ­will depend on the struggles and negotiations among t­hese trajectories, likely without a winner. “If t­here is a winner,” Mignolo adds, “it would be the agreement that global ­futures ­shall be polycentric and noncapitalist. Which means that a strug­gle for world domination…w ould yield to pluriversality as a universal proj­ect” (33-34). Citing Humberto Maturana’s maxim that “when one puts objectivity in parentheses, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other” (27), Mignolo goes on to expound the decolonial option as the clearer path ­toward the pluriverse. This is a hopeful vision. It seems to me that one could explicitly posit emergent visions of transitions as another historical force within the spectrum of trajectories. Transition thinking may be found in the leftist, spiritual, and decolonial pathways ­imagined by Mignolo; however, in the senses discussed ­here—as an array of explicit discourses and imaginations—it cannot be encompassed within any of them.

Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press.

Mignolo, Walter, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2010. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge.