Fifteen new, specially written essays by leading scholars on a broad subject of central importance.

Vols. 2 and 5 include appendices.

'Local Histories/Global Designs' is an extended argument about the '"coloniality' of power. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies.

For many, America has become the primary symbol of all that is grotesque, deadening and oppressive. It is time, this text argues, to reaffirm confidence in American principles and remember that the US forged a system of liberal democratic government that has shaped the destiny of the modern world.

This book explores the significant intellectual impact the philosopher Jean Wahl had on the directions Gilles Deleuze took as a philosopher and writer of a philosophy of experimentation. The study of this influence also brings to light the significance of Deleuze's emphasis on la pragmatique, inspired by Wahl's writings and teachings and his fascination with American pluralism and pragmatism, particularly that of William James. This book also attempts to put Deleuze's theories into action, to write in a deleuzian way about American 'minor' literature and thought which Deleuze deemed 'superior.' This text inherently challenges and potentially provides an alternative way of reading/writing to standard critical approaches which Deleuze tells us necessarily reduce and distort a 'minor' work's most lively, subtle and micro-politically efficient elements as they abort them from their 'minoritarian' fields of meaning to coerce them into already existing, standard and standardizing concepts that belong to and reinforce the 'Major Order's' organizational grid.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.