Walter Mignolo—Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking

 
 In Local Histories/Global Designs:  Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Mignolo describes the role that colonial difference plays in contemporary conceptions of modernity and the enactment of subaltern knowledges operating on the borders of the current world system.   Mignolo calls this current world system a modern/colonial world system to signify the interdependence of modernity and [...]

Wallerstein, Immanuel European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power

 
In this tiny but powerful collection of essays adapted from various conference presentations, Wallerstein traces contemporary rhetorics of modernity back to the Sepulveda/Las Casas debate in the 1500s over who has the right to intervene, when, and how in the treatment of Amerindians who were forced to labor in the Spanish system of ecomienda in [...]

Villanueva, Victor “Memoria is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color”

In this essay, Villanueva interwines poetry, narrative, and memory to disrupt traditional academic conventions where memory  and emotion have no legitimate place.  Academic discourse, according to Villanueva, is too logocentric in its effort to “reach the Aristotelian ideal of being completely logocentric, though it cannot be freed of the ethical appeal to authority” (12).  Villanueva [...]

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture—Chapter 1 “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern”

General:
Bhaba combines interdisciplinary theories into one dense package.  Modernity=order, progress, central meaning, linearity.  Postmodernism=art and lit. movement, no central meaning; everything is text with no single interpretation; everything is text; neo-Marxism drives postmodern theory=agency less important because individual is always constituted with institutional indoctrination and culture always speak through us and ideology is interpolated in us; [...]

Said– “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” –Chapter 1 from CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM

Dominant powers interested in defining homogenous culture so it is easier to manage and within the culture, people want to homogenize culture to gather power against dominant forces….
 
 ”History, in other words, is not a calculating machine.  It unfolds in the mind and the imagination, and it takes body in the multifarious responses of a people’s [...]

“Codex Scripts of Resistance: From Columbus to the Border Patrol” Damian Baca

WARNING: LONG SUMMARY AHEAD. SKIP TO BOTTOM FOR COMMENTS.
In “Codex Scripts of Resistance: From Columbus to Border Control,” Damian Baca (Yeah CCR!) rocks the C & R Ranch with a compelling rhetorical analysis of Mestiz@ rhetorics of resistance and challenges us to reconceptualize our ethnocentric, alphacentric, hegemonic views and pedagogies of rhetoric and [...]

Ricouer: “What is text?” and “Metaphor and the problem of Interpretation”

Paul Ricoeur “What is a text? Explanation and understanding” from Hermeneutics and the human sciences. 1981.
In this article, Ricoeur attempts to deconstruct the binary between explanation and interpretation. Explanation, he explains, is thought to be borrowed from the natural sciences and is a central tool of positivism. Interpretation, on [...]