Papers by Robert J C Young
Boundary 2, 2023
The complex relations between the Soviet Union and the Soviet states of the Caucasus that were fo... more The complex relations between the Soviet Union and the Soviet states of the Caucasus that were formerly parts of the Ottoman and Persian empires offer examples of complex cultural and political relations of antagonism and appropriation that go beyond simple binaries of resistance or nationalist anti-eurocentrism. Though their work is little known except to scholars in Slavic Studies, in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet Orientologists laid the foundations for the critique of Western Orientalism that would be introduced to the West many years later in 1978 by Edward W. Said. The Soviet critique of the imperialist foundations of Eurocentric culture and academic knowledge formed the basis for the huge World Literature publishing project pioneered by Maxim Gorky, an initiative which has been largely disregarded—both historically and theoretically—in the Western rediscovery of World Literature in the era of globalization. Similarly, Western postcolonial scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge the creative, cultural and political affiliations of Global South writers to internationalist organizations such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association which was supported by the Soviet Union in the Cold War period and the importance of publications such as Lotus magazine. The books reviewed here demonstrate the degree to which histories of “postcolonialism” and the late western critique of Orientalism have now been rewritten to acknowledge their sources in earlier critiques by Soviet scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Siting Postcoloniality, eds Caroline Hau and Pheng Cheah, 2022
Given its long historical perspective on European imperialism, Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Ea... more Given its long historical perspective on European imperialism, Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth has been allied by some commentators with certain postcolonial perspectives. Could there be a nomos of postcoloniality? In this essay I suggest that this view amounts to a profound misreading of Schmitt's text.
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Le Soir d'Algérie, 2022
Quelle était la relation de Fanon avec l'Algérie ? Pourquoi a-t-il choisi d'y aller ? Comment s'e... more Quelle était la relation de Fanon avec l'Algérie ? Pourquoi a-t-il choisi d'y aller ? Comment s'est-il retrouvé impliqué dans la guerre d'indépendance de l'Algérie ? Comment s'est-il tellement identifié au pays ?
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Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2022
This essay forms the introduction to a special issue of Interventions (2022:5) on the work of the... more This essay forms the introduction to a special issue of Interventions (2022:5) on the work of the Russian linguist Nikolai Marr (The Anticolonial Linguistics of Nikolai Marr, Edited by Matthew Carson Allen and Robert J.C. Young). Outside the work of a small number of pioneering Slavic linguists and historians, Marr is little known today. In this essay I argue that Marr’s writings are worth re-examining, particularly in the light of his critique of European linguistics as propagating the racist ideology of imperialism and the subjugation of colonized peoples – now characterized as Orientalism. The first part of the essay situates Marr’s work within the wider context of the division since the nineteenth century between mainstream European comparative philology based in Germany, with its hierarchical model of family trees, and the more egalitarian tradition developed in Eastern Europe that emphasized the lateral interactions of speech in social contexts, with related languages operating in their own ecosystems of geographical proximity. In the second part of the essay I consider some of the elements of Marr’s work that remain of interest: his critique of Orientalism in linguistics, of the relations between western knowledges and forms of colonial power, on language as something not to be studied in isolation but as a living part of the social ecosystem and its power relations, and his conceptual emphasis on lateral thinking through rhizomatic forms and hybridization.
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Oxford Literary Review, 2022
In this essay, dedicated to the memory of Laura Marcus, I contrast Freud’s account of mourning in... more In this essay, dedicated to the memory of Laura Marcus, I contrast Freud’s account of mourning in Mourning and Melancholia to that of Merleau Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. In suggesting a somatic as well as a psychic response, Merleau Ponty, I argue, more accurately accounts for the ways in which we experience loss and why, contrary to Freud’s suggestion, mourning’s work is never completed.
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Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2022
In commemoration of Nawal El Saadawi after her passing. I compare her to two other revolutionary ... more In commemoration of Nawal El Saadawi after her passing. I compare her to two other revolutionary doctors, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara
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Recherche littéraire/Literary Research (ICLA), 2021
Irrecoverable Histories
Robert JC Young
This essay opens with a discussion of Edward Said’s e... more Irrecoverable Histories
Robert JC Young
This essay opens with a discussion of Edward Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile” in order to distinguish between exile and migration. It goes on to differentiate between two forms of migration narrative—those migrants from the Global South who arrive in the West (which comprises the majority of migration stories published in Europe and North America), and the majority of migrants who move, and often must keep moving, outside the boundaries of the West. It is this latter group that Said highlights in his discussion of Palestinian exilic diaspora, claiming that their histories are “irrecoverable”. Curiously he illustrates this by turning to Conrad’s story “Amy Foster”. I suggest that he could instead have turned to Ghassān Kanafānī’s well-known novella “Men in the Sun”, which not only focuses on those who must continue traveling without ever arriving, but offers a theoretical model of migration as the repeated experience of aporias. I elaborate this idea through a discussion of mētis, or “cunning intelligence”, in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, illustrated through a discussion of Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015).
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Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2021
In this essay I argue May ‘68 was (1) in its way an anticolonial revolution, since it was directe... more In this essay I argue May ‘68 was (1) in its way an anticolonial revolution, since it was directed against a President and government that had been imposed on France ten years previously by the colons of Algeria; (2) the visible staging of an epistemological break that has marked the contemporary era in which the grounds of knowledge have been switched from history to the spatialized present, from western epistemology based on the linearity of script to the spatialized iconic mode of the image, from diachronic to synchronic forms of understanding.
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Moving Worlds, 2021
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French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK, 2020
What is the relation of "Theory" to Literature and Philosophy? And what do we really mean by "the... more What is the relation of "Theory" to Literature and Philosophy? And what do we really mean by "theory"?
A contribution to the volume on "French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK", ed. Irving Goh (2020)
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Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, Joanna Waley-Cohen (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building (London: Routledge), 517-547., 2018
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Oxford Literary Review, 2020
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in Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells, eds Oliver Davis and Colin Davis (Cambridge: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2019), 2019
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Wasafiri, 2005
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Translation, 2012
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Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, 2003
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The Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies, ed. Sandra Berman, 2014
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PMLA, 2016
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The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, ed. N. Nesbitt, 2017
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Marcus and Mukherjee, A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, 2014
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Papers by Robert J C Young
Robert JC Young
This essay opens with a discussion of Edward Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile” in order to distinguish between exile and migration. It goes on to differentiate between two forms of migration narrative—those migrants from the Global South who arrive in the West (which comprises the majority of migration stories published in Europe and North America), and the majority of migrants who move, and often must keep moving, outside the boundaries of the West. It is this latter group that Said highlights in his discussion of Palestinian exilic diaspora, claiming that their histories are “irrecoverable”. Curiously he illustrates this by turning to Conrad’s story “Amy Foster”. I suggest that he could instead have turned to Ghassān Kanafānī’s well-known novella “Men in the Sun”, which not only focuses on those who must continue traveling without ever arriving, but offers a theoretical model of migration as the repeated experience of aporias. I elaborate this idea through a discussion of mētis, or “cunning intelligence”, in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, illustrated through a discussion of Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015).
A contribution to the volume on "French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK", ed. Irving Goh (2020)
Robert JC Young
This essay opens with a discussion of Edward Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile” in order to distinguish between exile and migration. It goes on to differentiate between two forms of migration narrative—those migrants from the Global South who arrive in the West (which comprises the majority of migration stories published in Europe and North America), and the majority of migrants who move, and often must keep moving, outside the boundaries of the West. It is this latter group that Said highlights in his discussion of Palestinian exilic diaspora, claiming that their histories are “irrecoverable”. Curiously he illustrates this by turning to Conrad’s story “Amy Foster”. I suggest that he could instead have turned to Ghassān Kanafānī’s well-known novella “Men in the Sun”, which not only focuses on those who must continue traveling without ever arriving, but offers a theoretical model of migration as the repeated experience of aporias. I elaborate this idea through a discussion of mētis, or “cunning intelligence”, in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, illustrated through a discussion of Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015).
A contribution to the volume on "French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK", ed. Irving Goh (2020)
Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon's work has been deeply significant for successive generations of intellectuals-for anti-colonial and civil rights activists in the 60s and 70s, for those working in postcolonial studies from the 80s to the present day, and currently for specialists of French and North African history, of colonial psychiatry, and ethnopsychiatry, and for all those who work with conflicts of identity in postcolonial societies.
Frantz Fanon is regarded as a foundational thinker of Postcolonial Studies, bringing together the analysis of colonialism from an objective, historical perspective and an interrogation of its subjective effects on colonizer and colonized alike. This book furthers his powerful intervention into how we think about identity, race and activism and provides a unique insight into Fanon's literary works and psychiatric, philosophical and historical theories.
Alienation and Freedom offers a remarkable opportunity to discover a range of unknown literary, psychiatric, and political works by Fanon, many of which were never published before, and throws new light on the thinking of a major 20th-century philosopher whose disruptive and moving work continues to shape how we look at the world.
Keywords: Robert Young; aesthetics; postcolonial literature(s); third space; postcolonial subjectivity
Young to the section on theater in the book Alienation and Freedom
by Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), which he co-edited with Jean Khalfa.
In this part of the introduction, Young focuses on the historical
and philosophical circumstances surrounding Fanon, specifically
the surrealist existentialism which characterized his writings. With
numerous excerpts from Fanon’s texts, tracing the biographies of
authors who left an imprint on Fanon, Young introduces the reader
to Fanon’s theatrical writing in this introduction to the first publication of Fanon’s plays.