This innovative book by one of the leading exponents in the field introduces 'postcolonialism' in both theoretical and historical terms. Robert Young provides a wide-ranging analysis of postcolonial theory's emergence from anticolonial movements in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, tracing the development of a transnational third-world counter-modernity through the work of major figures of the freedom struggles, including Cabral, Connolly, Fanon, Gandhi, Guevara, Nkrumah, Mao, Mariategui, and Senghor, and through the roles played by women activists. Young suggests that the anti-colonial movements were revolutionary mixtures of the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, diasporic formations of intellectual and cultural resistance that produced new kinds of knowledge that flourished alongside anti-colonial political practice. Postcolonial theory marks the intrusion of these radically different perspectives into the academy, hitherto dominated by the criteria of the west. Young argues that while postcolonial critique challenges established, eurocentric knowledge in the cultural sphere, it must continue to work in the spirit of the anticolonial movements by further developing its radical political edge to enforce social justice on a global basis. This is a stimulating introduction for those new to postcolonial theory, while offering more advanced readers a fresh perspective on the dynamics and history of the field.

Author Biography

Robert J. C. Young is Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University and a fellow of Wadham College. He is the author of White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (1995), and Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory (1996). Robert Young is also the General Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.