An exchange: questions from Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou and answers from Walter Mignolo

Abstract

1. Border thinking and border epistemology assert the imperative of 'thinking the other'. Does this 'taking a position' presume an existence, or possibility, of 'betweenness' as the locus of (both) the one and the other? Not exactly; it is not a matter of ‘thinking the other’ but rather, the ‘other thinking’. I, and I am not alone so I would say we, are the ‘other’. And when the other thinks there is no longer the other, the necessary condition for the existence of the other is that the other doesn’t think. If we keep that geography and geopolitics of reasoning we keep ‘border thinking’ within imperial epistemology; border thinking is domesticated by leftist and progressive modern, Eurocentred thinking. To put it more specifically: Caliban’s reason (as I read Paget Henry introducing Caribbean philosophy) is border thinking. Prospero cannot understand that because, for Prospero, there is no reasoning in Caliban. Therefore, this is not the question of making Prospero more aware and less blind. No. It is delinking from Prospero and embracing Caliban’s experience. So that border thinking and border epistemology presupposes to know the reason of the master and the reason of the slave while the master only knows the reason of the master. By definition, the slave has no reason. You could object, pointing out that I am not Caribbean of African descent and, therefore, I do not carry in my body the memories and traces of slavery. My answer would be that the colonial wound is spread and felt all over the world, and by migrants in Western Europe and the United States of America, for example.