Walter D. Mignolo, "The Darker Side of the Renaissance:Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization"

 

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.