Robert J. C. Young

Robert J. C. Young FBA (born 1950) is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian. Young was educated at Repton School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read for a B.A. and D.Phil., taught at the University of Southampton, and then returned to Oxford University where he was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College. In 2005, he moved to New York University where he is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. From 2015 - 2018, he was Dean of Arts & Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. As a graduate student at Oxford, he was one of the founding editors of the Oxford Literary Review, the first British journal devoted to literary and philosophical theory. Young is Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies which is published eight times a year. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. In 2013 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, in 2017 he was elected to an honorary life fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford. Young is currently President of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory. Young's work has been described as being 'at least partially instrumental in the radicalisation of postcolonialism'. His first book, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) argues 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. Offering a detailed critique of different versions of European Marxist historicism from Lukács to Jameson, Young suggests that a major intervention of postcolonial theory has been to enable different forms of history and historicisation that operate outside the paradigm of Western universal history. While postcolonial theory uses certain concepts from post-structuralism to achieve this, Young argues that post-structuralism itself involved an anti-colonial critique of Western philosophy, pointing to the role played by the experience of the Algerian War of Independence in the lives of many French philosophers of that generation, including Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Althusser, and Bourdieu.