Walter Mignolo explores the darker facets of the
Renaissance, moving beyond the brutality of the Spanish Imperial venture in
America to examine its lasting legacy. In his book, Mignolo adopts an
explicitly political stance, aiming to "speak the present by theorizing
the past." As an Argentinian academic working in the United States and
writing about a Hispanic subject in English, Mignolo does not shy away from the
contradictions inherent in his position. Instead, he explicitly links these
contradictions to the transformations brought about by the legacy of the
"dark" Renaissance.
Mignolo's work stands out in the realm of postcolonial
theory. While he is well-versed in the literature on the postcolonial and the
subaltern, his book transcends the often limiting critical double binds found
in many works in this field. His primary theoretical tool is the notion of a
"pluritopic" hermeneutic practice, which he employs to discuss power
relations in language, memory, and space between peoples with different systems
of representation.
The colonization of language is a central theme in Mignolo's
exploration of the Renaissance. He delves into Renaissance philosophies of
language, comparing the use of Alonso de Nebrija’s Latin and Castilian grammars
in the New World. Mignolo convincingly argues for the predominance of Latin
grammar in the early Imperial project, given Latin’s association with the truly
civilized state. This discussion seamlessly transitions into an analysis of the
colonization of memory through the writing of history. Mignolo examines the
consequences of Western historiography's claims to universality on Amerindian
notions of the past. He acknowledges shared territory in the understanding of
history for both Spaniards and Amerindians, particularly evident in his
readings of Bernardo Boturini and Francisco Patrizi.
Mignolo's emphasis on genres as social practices reveals the
dark side of the Renaissance in a shift toward the heterogeneous and the
hybrid. His project, inherently deconstructive, focuses on discontinuities.
Mignolo provocatively interprets the encyclopedic projects of Francis Bacon and
Bernardino de Sahagún, highlighting the daring nature of his approach. Bacon,
situated in the center of Western intellectual production, critiques his own
epistemological tradition, while Sahagún, on the periphery, uses the tradition
to understand different cultures.
Despite Mignolo's attention to the marginal, this part of
his book remains somewhat skewed towards a history of a culturally specific
print culture, especially given the consequences of empire for Amerindian
"writing" and the availability of source material. Consequently,
Mignolo's analysis tends to be top-down for the Westerners, neglecting the
vitality of aural/oral and popular representational practices. On the other
hand, it is bottom-up for the Amerindians, who are not differentiated in terms
of social class but are clearly identified as the oppressed.
Mignolo's investigation of the colonization of space focuses
on the supposedly purifying power of the grand narrative of science. He
explores the work of the Spanish cosmographer royal, López de Velasco, who
produced verbal descriptions and maps based on indigenous accounts. The
strategies of propriety and appropriation when translating Amerindian
manuscripts and cosmologies into Spanish print are central to Mignolo's account
of cultural translation.
In the afterword, Mignolo reviews his position vis-à-vis
Jacques Derrida, aligning himself against the common criticism of
deconstruction as apolitical. Mignolo's work can be described as one of
"affirmative" deconstruction, rejecting absolute relativism and
representation as a category of analysis in favor of "enactment"—a
genuinely political materialism as he conceives it. However, this critical
acumen is occasionally separated from the main body of the text, leading to a
somewhat challenging reading experience. The division of hard theory from
practice may be intentional, given the book's overall disregard for traditional
academic boundaries.
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