Who is Walter Mignolo?

Around the mid-1970s in Latin America raged what the Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama once called the ‘catastrophic era’. Rama described the takeover, in quick succession, of Latin America’s states by brutal Right-wing military dictatorships, many backed by the United States. Amid widespread criminal state violence against peasants, Indigenous people, writers, trade unionists, students and artists, many intellectuals fled. In Argentina, a 1966 military coup had led to heavy intervention in the country’s flourishing universities. Walter Mignolo, originally from a small town in the province of Córdoba, was a literature student at the National University of Córdoba. After graduating, Mignolo left for Paris in 1969, where he received his PhD under the French critic Roland Barthes before going on to teach at the universities of Toulouse, Indiana and Michigan. His landmark book The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) was published when debates prompted by the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival to the New World absorbed the Hispanophone intellectual world. Mignolo asked how to remember, how to historicise, the conquest and the genocide that followed? What was the role of history and writing, and thought itself, in the genocide?