Robert J.C. Young
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- For other persons named Robert Young, see Robert Young (disambiguation).
Robert JC Young (born 1950) is a postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian.
He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, taught at the University of Southampton, and then returned to Oxford where he was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College. In 2005, he moved to New York University where is now Silver Professor, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
Young's first work, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) argued that Marxist philosophies of history had claimed to be world histories but had really only ever been histories of the West, seen from a Eurocentric--even if anti-capitalist--perspective. In Colonial Desire (1995), Young examined the history of the concept of 'hybridity', showing its genealogy through nineteenth-century racial theory and twentieth-century linguistics, prior to its transformation into an innovative cultural-political concept by postcolonial theorists in the 1990s. This was followed by Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), a work which offers the first comprehensive account of the history and theoretical production of all the major anti-colonial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the globe and traces their relation to the development of post-colonial theory. Stressing the significance of the work of the Third International, as well as Mao Zedong's reorientation of the landless peasant as the revolutionary subject, Young points to the importance of the Havana Tricontinental of 1966 as the first independent coming together of the three continents of the South--Africa, Asia and Latin America--in political solidarity, and argues that this was the moment in which what is now called 'postcolonial theory' was first formally constituted as a specific knowledge-base of non-Western political and cultural production. In Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), Young links this genealogy of post-colonialism to the contemporary activism of the New Social Movements in non-Western countries.
Contents
1.1 Selected Bibliography
1.2 External links
[edit] Selected Bibliography
White Mythologies: Writing History and the West Routledge, London and New York 1990. Second edition, 2004. ISBN 0-415-31181-0
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race Routledge, London and New York, 1995. ISBN 0-415-05374-9
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction Blackwell Publishers, Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2001. ISBN 0-631-20071-1
Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. ISBN 0-19-280182-1
