Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference

This chapter explores theoretical responses to and departures from the modern world system. The first part looks into Anibal Quijano's concept of “coloniality of power” and Enrique Dussel's “transmodernity” as responses to global designs from colonial histories and legacies in Latin America. The second part is devoted to Abdelkhebir Khatibi's “double critique” and “une pensée autre” (an other thinking) as a response from colonial histories and legacies in Maghreb. The chapter also studies Edouard Glissant's notion of “Créolization,” proposed to account for the colonial experience of the Caribbean in the horizon of modernity and as a new epistemological principle. These perspectives, from Spanish America, Maghreb, and the Caribbean, contribute today to rethinking, critically, the limits of the modern world system—the need to conceive it as a modern/colonial world system and to tell stories not only from inside the “modern” world but from its borders.