ABSTRACT
In his Local Histories/Global Designs, Mignolo (2000) argues that the economic conditions created by globalization contributed to the rise of a form of thinking he calls "barbarian theorizing" or "border thinking" (pp. 308-309). He uses "barbarian" not in the sense of being in opposition to a purported "civilized" form of thinking, but as a displacement and departure from models considered to be universally valid from an (unselfconsciously or uncritical) Euro-centric or western perspective. In this sense, "barbarian theorizing" is theorizing from the "border," where the "border" means both threshold and liminality, as two sides connected by a bridge, as a geographic and an epistemological location. This means thinking as someone who has both "the formation in 'civilized theorizing' and the experience of someone who lives and experiences, including the training in 'civilized theorizing,' in communities that have been precisely subalternized and placed in the margins by the very concept and expansion of European civilization" (Mignolo, 2000, p. 309).
