Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas

Transoceanic Studies

by Madina V. Tlostanova, Walter D. Mignolo

Learning to Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas is a complex, multisided rethinking of the epistemic matrix of Western modernity and coloniality from the position of border epistemology. Colonial and imperial differences are the two key concepts to understanding how the logic of coloniality creates ontological and epistemic exteriorities. Being at once an enactment of decolonial thinking and an attempt to define its main grounds, mechanisms, and concepts, the book shifts the politics of knowledge from “studying the other” (culture, society, economy, politics) toward “the thinking other” (the authors).
 

Addressing areas as diverse as the philosophy of higher education, gender, citizenship, human rights, and indigenous agency, and providing fascinating and little-known examples of decolonial thinking, education, and art, Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo deconstruct the modern architecture of knowledge—its production and distribution as manifested in the corporate university. In addition, the authors dwell on and define the echoing global decolonial sensibilities as expressed in the Americas and in peripheral Eurasia.

 

The book is an important addition to the emerging transoceanic inquiries that introduce decolonial thought and non-Western border epistemologies not only to update or transform disciplines but also to act and think decolonially in the global futures to come.

Genres: Philosophy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2012

Reviews

[Muneerah Razak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really hard to read casually because (1) it is written in academic language and (2) Tlostanova and Mignolo really went into different aspects of “thinking decolonially”. They covered these topics:
Part 1 presents the decolonial framework: logic of coloniality; thinking from the borders
Part 2 focuses on central Asia and gender: where do non-european soviet (ex-)colonies lie on the global level; coloniality of gender
Part 3 provides a critique of the liberal concepts of the human, human rights, global citizenship, and the humanities: who is the ‘human’ in Human Rights; rethinking citizenship and how globalisation affects knowledge.

Learning to unlearn is a book that lays out the concept of how colonialism and modernity are linked, and how “decoloniality” calls for ‘delinking’ with modernity and Eurocentrism, instead of an outright rejection of modernity and anything Western.

In simpler language, they write about how we can critique aspects of modernity today, separate it from Western (epistemic) domination and subsume or redefine aspects of modernity through multiples lens (from a Muslim, Latin, Black, Central Asian etc perspective). Interestingly, this book incorporate central Asia into an originally Latin American/global south perspective.

Its a great book if you’re looking to use the decolonial framework for your research/scholarship and also if you want to expand the conversation of ‘alternate route of modernity’ in Russia and the ex Soviet Union. But if you want to learn more about coloniality/modernity and decoloniality by Mignolo, its enought to read the intro and chp1 or his shorter articles online.