Interview with Walter D. Mignolo: The Decolonial Option introducing the geography of knowledge, sensing and desire

In t his first part of the interview, Mignolo places the intellectual coordinates where his first work, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), was published, along with the need to develop the concept of colonial semiosis and the reception of his theses at that time. He also describes the possibilities (or impossibilities) of dialogue between the decolonial perspective and other perspectives like the postmodern and the postcolonial ones, referring to diverse theoretical inscriptions, especially due to geopolitical differences. Hence, he proposes a pluriversal alternative to modern Western universalism that attempts to set his provincialism (first Christian, then liberal, and now neoliberal) as the truth itself (Eurocentrism or Atlanticism). Finally, the author locates his own "cosmic-cultural formation" concerning the rebuilding of concepts displaced by Western civilization in its process of building the modern-colonial vocabulary and subjectivities.