This interview with Walter Mignolo expands on the issues of modernities, border thinking, geopolitics of knowledge, subalternity and post-Occidentalism presented in Local Histories /Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges , and Border Thinking (Princeton UP 2000) . Since the mid eighties, Mignolo has worked on what he calls "the colonial question." This interest led to the publication of The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), (unanimously praised in literary, social and historical journals) one of the most influential and widely discussed assessments of the European colonial expansion in the Americas. Local Histories takes up and expands on the notions of colonial and imperial difference and the coloniality of power, crucial questions raised in Darker Side. Local Histories also connects critical discourses of Eurocentrism and globalization from different parts of the world to different critical traditions (Latin American, U.S. Latina/o, North African, Indian and South European) in order to makes us think "with, against and beyond the legacy of Western epistemologa " However, for all its academic erudition, Local Histories can be understood as a political and ethical manifesto that forces us to think about the ethics and politics of teaching and research, the institutional production of knowledge, and our own investment (as academics) in perpetuating both colonial differences and social injustices.