后殖民理论的反思与期待——罗伯特·杨教授访谈录

罗伯特·杨 生安锋

(美国纽约大学;清华大学,北京,100084)

Sheng: Professor Young, you have become very influential in China since the 1990s, which was almost twenty years ago. And your definition of the postcolonial Trinity, which refers to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, has been so influential that in the field of contemporary western literary theories, every one knows them and reads their works, largely because of your introduction. So in a sense, you are actually the founder of the discipline because, while the critics were theorizing in their own special field, it’s you who clarified the field of postcolonial study and drew interesting connections among different theorists. Equally important, while people’s knowledge of the postcolonial critics remains so limited, partly due to their writing style and their exotic English (here we think of Spivak and Bhabha), it was you who actually introduced them to the wider audience and to the worlds outside of English countries, deepened readers’ understanding of their concepts, and helped popularize their formidable theories. So many people began to know these critics via your work. Could we say that in a sense you are more important to the readers than the theorists themselves? Did you promote their postcolonial theories as a counterbalance of the Eurocentric theories?

Young: Well, I don’t think I am more important than them: they were the true pioneers of the field. As for me, I was looking for alternatives to the historicism in theories of history that I discussed in the first part of my bookWhiteMythologies—a trajectory that many years later Dipesh Chakraborty would retrace and develop in a different way inProvincializingEurope. What I found was a Eurocentrism that was so consistent that it in some sense baffled me, even with Sartre, who was the person most aware of the world outside Europe. He was the French philosopher who was most concerned with third world issues, the friend of Frantz Fanon, who wrote the preface toTheWretchedoftheEarth. He spent a lot of his time and energy promoting his concern with third world politics in the 1960s. But even Sartre in hisCritiqueofDialecticalReason:TheoryofPracticalEnsembles, which is his book about history, in some sense, relegated that other world to a marginal space. So it was really remarkable, I thought, the degree to which people either focused on Europe or on the worlds outside Europe, but never put those two together. They never seemed to find it a problem that so much historical and cultural work was Eurocentric in its perspectives. And that’s why I looked at the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, even though at some level, they didn’t even really have an answer to my question, which was actually how to write history—how you could write a different kind of history outside the confines of the boundaries of the West. They didn’t formally address that issue, but I could see, reading their work that they had ideas about how to achieve such things, that their work was about trying to transform our perspectives on the way, that a whole set of related issues were discussed and conceptualized—what we would now call a postcolonial perspective. In fact, when I was writingWhiteMythologies, what I had originally in mind when I was planning the book was to devote just one chapter to a discussion of their work. I was going to put them together as a so-to-speak “third world contingent,” which was intended to, in some sense, not balance the rest of the book (which discussed European Marxist philosophers of history) but at least suggest avenues for exploration for future work. But when I started writing about them and thinking through the issues they raised, as happens so often in academic writing, the thing got bigger. So instead of writing one chapter, I wrote three chapters, devoting one to each because I got completely taken up with the issues they presented.

And yes, I did offer what in 1990 was the first account of the work of those three writers, and I was the first person to put them together as a field. Having said that, I didn’t actually use the term “postcolonial.” That wasn’t a word we used at that time. The term “postcolonial” was really brought in by the book by Bill Ashcroft et al. which was published in 1999 the year beforeWhiteMythologiescalledTheEmpireWritesBack. They used postcolonial in a particular, ahistorical way. It didn’t really take off as the term for the field until the mid 90s. That was why the term “postcolonial” doesn’t occur in the original edition ofWhiteMythologies, but nevertheless, as you said, one can see now that what I was doing was in a sense marking the emergence of the field. At that time I was trying to position them in relation to the philosophy of history of western Marxism and in some sense my full answer to the question that I raised inWhiteMythologiesreally came later, inPostcolonialism:AHistoricalIntroduction, in which I developed a more historical, if still theoretical narrative, charting the emergence of a different history, a history that normally got blocked out, was never connected to the Marxism “proper” of Europe—but that was much later. So in some sense theHistoricalIntroductionis a book written as an answer to myself, to the original questions with which I beganWhiteMythologies.

In retrospect now, twenty years later, I think that history has shown that I was right picking those three thinkers above anybody else in terms of contemporary intellectuals doing a different kind of work. I mean they were the people who were shifting things, opening up the field. I don’t think you can really suggest anybody else at that time who was doing the same kind of work. So for me they were and they remain the three significant figures who individually in different ways (of course they knew each other and read each other’s works so they were not entirely separate), were initiating what came to be called Postcolonial Studies. What I was doing at that point was something a bit different, raising a different question that has now become an interest of the Subaltern Studies historians, because I was absorbed in the question of history philosophically. What is interesting about Spivak and Bhabha is that their writing is not primarily historical, whereas with Said, there is certainly a very strong historical perspective. Perhaps it was because of that, that in fact I gave him the hardest time of the three. I would say now that I was too critical of Said in that book, for actually his perspective in general is the one that I have worked with myself in terms of the way he historicizes culture, puts culture against history, which is really what I do. And theory is part of that culture, just as culture relates to history. That’s what Said is looking at. And that’s my interest too.

Sheng: Thank you. Now Professor Edward Said has passed away. If you want to re-map the postcolonial theorists, would you still include G.C. Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha? Who else are the most influential postcolonial theorists in the current world?

Young: Well, that’s an interesting question because it opens up the whole question of where the postcolonial is today. Wherever it is, I would certainly include Bhabha and Spivak. I might include myself. The others whom I would include who I think have done the most significant kind of work are generally speaking the Indian political scientists and historians.

Sheng: The Subaltern Studies group?

Young: Yes, the Subaltern Studies group basically. I do mention the Subaltern Studies historians inWhiteMythologies, but I don’t treat them as substantially as I might have done. Now I could not but include more fully historians such as Ranajit Guha, who really initiated Subaltern Studies as an anti-nationalist, anti-CPI (Communist Party of India) Naxalite project, and then the main figures after him who would be Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gyan Prakash. There are other important figures as well in that group, and one should add the Latin American Subaltern Studies historians also. That group as a group has done something extremely important. They have really put a mark on both the writing of history generally, and also on the way that postcolonial studies operates for they have given it a historical dimension, which I think has been both very radical and powerful. So they are the people who would immediately spring to my mind if I was to map the field today for they have been the ones defining the field. There are many others one could add, though of course the perspectives of postcolonial studies have been taken up in so many fields now that it is harder to maintain the sense of people working primarily in a single arena.

Sheng: Is Ella Shohat very critical of Bhabha and Spivak?

Young: She has been quite critical many years ago, but she herself is a postcolonial critic with a very different agenda focusing on the identity of Jews in the Middle East. There was a time when it was most characteristic of postcolonial critics for them to be critical of other postcolonial critics, which was perhaps a symptom of field formation, of people defining the parameters of what they thought the field should be. Terry Eagleton makes the point somewhere that the way you become a postcolonial critic is to denounce Edward Said and the whole field of postcolonial studies and that provides the initiation ceremony for becoming a postcolonial critic. Of course he was writing with his tongue in his cheek. However, there was a period in the 1990s, particularly after Aijaz Ahmad’sInTheory(1992), when everybody was denouncing everybody else, everyone was claiming to be more political than thou, so that in the end it became very narcissistic and completely futile in my view, missing the whole point of what Postcolonial Studies is supposed to be about, which is to bring about change in the world. So one of the rules, in fact the only rule we had when I founded my journalInterventionsin the late 1990s, was that we would not publish any of these ad hominem or ad feminam attacks on other critics. We never publish anything like that. And I think actually since that time, the situation has improved. People have found better things to do than just attacking other critics (usually more eminent than themselves) which increasingly seemed to me to be a futile waste of time—if you don’t like the work that is out there, why not write something better yourself? That is not to say that we should not be able to make critical remarks about the field, about certain ideas in the field, but it began to feed on itself, if you like—some people have virtually made their careers out of attacking others. I don’t object to anybody having particular problems with issues in postcolonial theory. I think Ella Shohat’s criticisms, for example, about the idea of the postcolonial are to the point. She is also doing very interesting new work, and there are many other people as well. In fact, when you are looking at the people who have really defined and shifted the field, it has never been those who spent their time whinging, objecting to the politics of this or that other critic.

Sheng: In China, there are a lot of misreadings and misinterpretations of the postcolonial theories and concepts, such as the use of postcolonialism to promote nationalism and essentialism in general. Have you found similar phenomena in other countries? What can be done by the cultural critics?

Young: I am not so familiar with what has been going on in China but I have found this a little bit elsewhere, for example in Eastern Europe. There was a flowering of interest in postcolonial criticism in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, when people said: well, we were colonized too by the Russians for forty or more years and now we are free, and sometimes this took the form—as it did in other postcolonial countries, of an assertion of nationalism, a retrieval of national identity. In general it is a particular reading, I suppose, of postcolonialism itself that can manage to find a source for nationalism in it. The story that postcolonialism tells is one in which nationalism is very important, historically it was very important, in terms of resisting colonialism—so in general we could say that it was anti-colonialism that invoked nationalism, while it has been Postcolonialism that has critiqued nationalism. Typically what happened, let’s say, in Africa when countries achieved independence was that the nationalism became, if you like, unhealthy, and often led to forms of corruption and so on and so forth. So very often postcolonial writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe and many others, have a trajectory with the early novels quite nationalistic and then after that they become more and more disillusioned with the state, if not the nation, as is the case with many Indian postcolonial writers and theorists. So in general it’s unusual for postcolonial theory to be used in an uncritical way in terms of nationalism, except where people feel there really is a situation which requires the kind of existence of nationalism, that is, where the nation has not yet come into being. And one example of that would be the one associated with Said himself, focused on the situation of Palestine in the Middle East. Clearly, if you haven’t got a country, then nationalism has a different register to it, because that’s what you are trying to achieve.

Sheng: It is still constructive.

Young: Yes, I mean in some sense they are the last nationalists if you like. But of course, there are other examples of a flowering of nationalism in particular in the regions where people use postcolonial theory as a way of developing regional identities, for example with the Basques in Spain, or in Indonesia. And then there is the whole question of, if you like, Orientalism in general, which is the whole language that countries in the East, people in the cultures of the East, feel in terms of the power structure between East and West. In the Muslim world there is a stronger sense of being a subaltern culture that has been humiliated and arrogantly dominated for over a century, particularly since the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the founding of the state of Israel after the Second, leading to the unresolved situation in the Middle East today. And maybe that’s a kind of nationalism, or a kind of transnational nationalism. With respect to China, you can tell me more than I would know but it’s also a kind of, if you like, anti-Orientalism, it’s an assertion against the power structure of Orientalism that Said described and that’s certainly also been the case in Japan. I know that people have used Said in order to develop a kind of reverse Orientalism, which in Said’s terms of course misses the point.

Other areas I suppose using these kinds of ideas would be in countries like Turkey, where the groups and political parties who are resisting the idea that Turkey should become part of Europe are very keen on Said, because his work allows them to push against the Europeanization of Turkey and to assert a non-European identity for Turkey and for the Muslim world generally. So postcolonial theory, which is itself multifarious in any case, does have different functions in different places. I would always expect that in any theory. Said himself in his essay “Traveling Theory” argues that when theory travels, it never looks exactly the same, because it is adapted to local conditions, so that it can be used for local purposes, and then very often you get people coming along and saying, well this is not the real thing because the word or idea originally meant X and yet here it is being used to mean Y, which is wrong. But that’s because it has travelled. And that itself can be a creative move, for that is how theories get developed, in cultural translation. If it is always X wherever it appears in the world, then it would simply be operating in the way a scientific theory should work, that is, if I come up with a correct scientific theory, it should work in any laboratory anywhere in the world in exactly the same way. Repeatability shows what it is true. If it works differently in China from the way it works in the US, then scientifically that cannot be true theory. It cannot be scientific. The theory would be wrong. But in the case of the humanities, philosophy and theory are not like that. Concepts and ideas get translated, and when they get translated, they get transformed. They get adapted for local purposes. And that is what should happen, for that is one way in which new ideas get created.

Sheng: Yes, in that sense, misreading is very understandable. But do you think it’s normal or constructive? For the postcolonial theories, nationalism is not something very healthy. It was once constructive before the national independence, but after that it becomes retrogressive, so what do you think of this kind of nationalism?

Young: If that is how Postcolonialism is being used, then it is disturbing because it suggests that it is being appropriated almost against itself. You could say that the whole point of the “post” of Postcolonialism has been to bring a specific focus to bear on highlighting the problems that nationalism brings, particularly the way that it tends to impose uniformity upon national culture, which is a kind of essentialism, and to deny the presence of cultural minorities and their languages, religions, etc. And then of course, nationalism so easily flows over into forms of aggression against other countries: so many countries begin by being nationalist in a positive way in order to secure their own autonomy, but then in order to maintain that the momentum end up by attacking their neighbors. It’s a very double-edged sword. If postcolonial theory can encourage people to reflect critically on nationalism then it is doing its work. If they are using it without any kind of self-critical reflection so that it ends up being used for pure nationalist purposes, then in a strong sense it is not postcolonial anymore, it has become something else. It has regressed to being simple nationalism. What Postcolonialism is trying to achieve is a way of ordering the world, and its civil societies, that is not predicated either on nations or nationalism.

Sheng: You became the Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University in 2005. Could you please say something about the future of Comparative Literature and also about the current problems we are facing in the field of Comparative Literature?

Young: Well the first question is: Does Comparative Literature have a future? The field itself was basically invented after the Second World War when people felt that by comparing literatures from different countries, this would produce international understanding and discourage war, which was very optimistic. That was why Comparative Literature had a European basis. The result was that it was often, and still can be actually, very oddly constructed so you’ll have an essay like the one by Paul de Man, for example, called simply “Keats and Hölderlin.” De Man’s essay takes the form of a comparison of the English and German writer, who lived at roughly the same time, comparing them as Romantic poets. In actuality they did not have any direct connection at all. I think that kind of comparative literature has reached its limit of usefulness, and people have recognized that. What has happened is that because, in part, of the critiques of nationalism, people have begun to question the whole way of treating literature according to national identity and national boundaries. And in the twentieth century this has become empirically problematic, very often, because writers themselves have moved around a lot. Look at Salmon Rushdie for example. He was born in British India, then came to Britain and then moved to the US. What nationality is he? What national tradition would you put him in? He writes with reference to a number of traditions. So it doesn’t make any sense to put him in a single national literary tradition at all. Maybe he is an example of the way that literature itself has become transnational. Comparative literature is best placed to pick up on that, and to make something of the fact that really from the twentieth century, beginning from modernism, literature was no longer, if it ever was, a merely national activity. In fact at that time, literature became an international activity. It may be written in different languages, but that doesn’t mean to say that there are strict monolingual traditions even within a single language because one of the paradoxes even of the idea of a national literature is that it assumes that writers simply read other writers who wrote in the same language, so it creates its own narrow tradition. But actually all writers have tended to read internationally: I mean, in the Renaissance, they all read the classics, classical writers, and many Renaissance writers in English wrote in Latin, and Italian, as well as in English. In the eighteenth-century they read the classics and the French; the English Romantics read German writers. So no more than you or I do, writers didn’t confine themselves to reading in a single language. Today, if we pick up a novel, it could be by anybody, it might be Indian, it might be South American, it might be German, it doesn’t really matter to us as readers, and writers are like that too. So we have to find of a new way of talking about literature in a different form.

On the one hand, you have got to look at the language in which a text is written, because literature at the end of the day is made up of words and written in a particular language. So we need to acknowledge whether it is written in the Chinese or in the English language. At the same time, we need to think about literature without necessarily drawing national boundaries between writers, and to think about ways of analyzing and historicizing literature other than according to national boundaries. And that, it seems to me, is what Comparative Literature as a discipline is best designed to do. Because Comparative Literature is basically multi-lingual, and actually literature itself is multi-lingual, and many writers are multilingual. Many twentieth century writers in particular have written in different languages, not just one language. At one point, I thought that literature would be dead in the water if we limited it to national literatures or a rigid comparison between discrete literatures. But now I actually think that the future for literary studies is that all literature ought to be studied in a framework where every other literature is present. You shouldn’t be able to study English literature without thinking about other literatures around the world. All literatures are part of a huge inter-related global network, and it is in this environment that comparative literature really comes to the fore. It is the only formal discipline which allows for writing across different languages and studies them in that framework, and that’s how I think literature should be considered. You can call it world literature if you like, though the problem of calling it world literature is that world literature tends to end up being literature in English plus translated texts.

The way world literature is often taught, certainly in the US, is still within one language (English of course), but it seems to me that one of the fundamental things we have to change is the idea that, you only need to use one language when you are studying literature. Everybody should be encouraged to think of literature as something that appears in different languages, and to look at its different multilingual manifestations. Obviously no single person can know all the world’s languages, so you are always standing on the edge of a huge unknown, which is quite humbling. It helps us to realize that literature is about the language that it uses as its medium, and that actually differences of language, are constantly emerging, as well as disappearing, even for example within English literature. Just to give you one example, people generally study English literature and French literature as separate traditions, but they don’t think of the fact that much medieval French literature was actually written in England. For 200 years, French was the national language of England! Some of the most famous medieval French poems are in fact technically part of English literature in the sense that they were written in England. But of course they’ve been put into the French tradition as if they had had no contact with England at all. How different though it suddenly looks when you realize that actually a huge chunk of English literature was written in French. And indeed, as I mentioned, many Renaissance writers in England wrote in Latin; they were writing in different languages without feeling it to be contradictory. Since it is defined by its opposition to single language study, I think that Comparative Literature offers a way of rethinking the whole form of literature, taking on board the fact that literature is written in a whole range of different languages, and that these languages are often interconnected in different ways: they are not and never have been separate.

Sheng: As far as I know, you have lectured in many Asian countries including India and Egypt. You have been married to an Asian woman, a British-born Pakistani woman for twenty years. So I assume you have a lot of experience with Asian cultures. I know it’s very difficult, but could you try comparing the Western culture in which you grew up and the Eastern cultures you know, such as Indian culture, Pakistani culture, Egyptian culture or maybe Chinese culture?

Young: Well, that is a difficult one! One thing I would say is that British culture now is partly South Asian. It has become very mixed. And British people have actually hybridized. All British people have taken on all sorts of aspects of Asian and some other cultures, Caribbean for example.

Sheng: Isn’t the mainstream still European?

Young: Well yes, and you think it is until you go to another, for example, English-speaking culture, such as the U.S. and you suddenly realize that how Indian or South Asian British culture has become. I think it is very interesting the way that they mix. For example, there are a lot of South Asian people in the media now in terms of film and TV and so forth. Many of them have taken on a certain British tradition of humor. A lot of South Asian writing in Britain is humorous—that’s the way they have found most effective in dealing with the issues about race in particular. The kind of humor they take on derives from an older working-class British tradition. So there has been mixture, with forms of appropriation there which makes the British Asians very different from, let’s say, the Indian Asians, where it is noticeable that humor has been a much less significant factor in Indian fiction for example. And most British people are fairly comfortable with the whole variety of aspects of Asian cultures. It’s not something they feel bothered by. It has indeed enriched British culture in all sorts of ways, so that it is very different from the British culture that I grew up in which was much more traditional.

This is the argument of my newest book,TheIdeaofEnglishEthnicity. Black and Asian cultural critics in the 1980s and 90s tended to assumed that British culture was homogeneous. Actually it was never so. It was always mixed, made up of different forms. So for example, there was a lot of conflict but similar kinds of absorption of Irish culture in particular in the nineteenth century to what has gone on with South Asian and Caribbean culture at the end of the twentieth. That sort of transformation has, to some extent, occurred transnationally, so that India for example is itself very different from the India of 1947 and particularly since the 1990s has become much more Americanized, with shopping malls and the like. So all sorts of transformations are constantly taking place. The issue then is really whether there is any kind of kernel of cultural difference that has remained untranslated, perhaps whether it is untranslatable, whether there is fundamental difference, if you like. And I am not so sure that there are essential differences. I think there are differences that emerge at certain points. For example, if you throw in the factor of class, let’s say take middle class people in Great Britain and middle class people in India, if you put them together there would be much less of a cultural shock than between working class people in England and, let’s say peasants in India, where the differences are more substantial. Having said that, a lot of immigrants into Britain from South Asia were people who were from working class backgrounds. The big difference that some critics miss is that whereas it is probably true that a lot of immigration of South Asians into the US has been from the professional middle classes, and certainly many South Asian academics are typically Brahmins, in the UK immigration largely came from the working or peasant classes.

Sheng: Is there any special reason for that?

Young: Different immigration policies. Basically, Britain encouraged immigration after World War Ⅱ because it needed manual workers, whereas in the US until the 1960s immigration was largely targeted at Europe; even after Bobby Kennedy opened it up to non-Europeans, you still basically had to be a qualified person to get a visa to go to work there. You can’t just say that “I am a laborer, can I get a work visa”—unless you win the Green Card lottery of course. In the UK, there was a shortage of manual laborers in Britain after the Second World War, and a lot of people from Caribbean and from what had been British India, came over.

To revert to your original question, though. I suppose I am somebody who is more used than many people maybe to dealing with cultural differences on an everyday basis. An Indian friend of mine once described me to another friend as different from most English and Americans because, she said, “he doesn’t other the other”. I’m probably more alert to the little things, you know just the little differences of behavior and so forth, what is acceptable and what is not, that make a difference in every culture. Because I sometimes will see things that others do not notice; I am probably more aware when people are making mistakes, or making people feel uncomfortable. To take one example, whether you touch people when you meet them, for example shake their hand, or, if you know them a little, kiss them on the cheek. In some cultures it’s OK to touch people; in others it’s not, particularly across genders. Physical contact is something that works differently in different cultures. These are the things you pick up by experience. That allows me, I suppose, to negotiate being in different cultures perhaps more easily than I would otherwise. At some level it’s there that the difficulties arise that create the sense of alienation. It’s really what ends up as something almost close to manners that makes a difference. And that’s something that I think people can learn but they do not necessarily choose to learn, or even notice the differences to learn from. People probably don’t learn because they don’t spend much time outside their own groups and cultures. For me it was just that for various reasons I used to spend a lot of time with people who come from different places and that’s always been the case since I was an adult. So that now I actually feel more comfortable if I am in a room which is mixed, than if I am in a room which is just full of, let’s say, white people. If there are only white people from a single background, I feel uncomfortable—for me there is literally something missing, which is other kinds of people. I don’t particularly like that environment. But I wouldn’t claim to be, you know, any particular expert on defining those kinds of cultural differences, because I think that would be arrogant.

Today people are becoming more aware of these things; indeed, there are business consultancies that are making lots of money by advising firms who want to go into new markets, you know, how to do business in China, and so forth. They will tell people that first thing you should do if you want to do business in China is that you should do this and you must never do that. It has become a lucrative commercial practice. But it’s interesting even there you know, looking at businesses, which businesses do succeed, who is successfully transforming their business so that it is able to work in other countries and who is not. It’s not that easy actually, because again there are all sorts of little things making it difficult. And for that reason for example, it is comparatively easy for Indians to come to Britain to do business in Britain because they know the system and because they are already likely to have a lot of contacts there.

Sheng: Could this also be considered part of the colonial heritage?

Young: Yes, it is in the sense of a shared tradition. But funnily enough, they have become much closer as countries and as cultures since the end of the empire, because in the last fifty years there has been much more mixture than there ever was before. Before it was two layers more or less discretely separated, but now it’s much more mixed. And Indian people have told me that they feel relatively at home when they come to Britain, whereas when they go to the US they feel it is a much more alien place—just as Jhumpa Lahiri describes it inTheNamesake. It’s then that they realize how comparatively easy it is to be in Britain. So, I think the common colonial cultural tradition does operate, just as so too, for example, the Spanish obviously get on more easily in Latin America, the French in Senegal, etc. These are colonial heritages. There is the language most importantly for a start and then certain kind of sympathies. And from that point of view probably, East Asia is the most difficult place for many people in the UK since it’s the most unknown or the least known. East Asia, including China, Japan, and Korea. They are probably more difficult for people to deal with. Though even there there is always Hong Kong, of course, which in many ways remains very British in certain aspects of its culture.

Sheng: Thank you! This question is very well answered. You’ve written a lot on Marxism or Marxist theories and you think, if I am right, that Marxist theories are misrepresented and somehow abused to the extent of becoming Eurocentric and dogmatic in their theoretical framework. So could you please say something about the influence of Marxism on you? What are the problems concerning the application and development of Marxist theories in the field of literary theories? What do you think of Marxism and its future vitality?

Young: Some people readingWhiteMythologiesparticularly have just simply assumed that I was anti-Marxist, which is not and was not the case. I wouldn’t have spent so much time with Marxism if I did not find something, indeed much of value in Marxism. I see myself, if you like, as a kind of “dissident Marxist”—which for some is perhaps even less forgivable than being anti-Marxist. I think the problem for Marxism historically has been this: on the one hand, in some senses it has been one of the most intelligent, powerful and certainly active intellectual traditions that has ever existed because so many intellectuals have found resources in Marxism over the past two centuries. There is nothing else you can point to that plays a similar role other than, perhaps theology itself in earlier centuries, in the sense that all intellectual work was done under its orbit and within its scope. For many years and in many places, to be an intellectual was to be a Marxist. The two were almost synonymous. But on the other hand, it does have or has had historically a tendency to develop a kind of theoretical rigidity, partly maybe because of the influence of Leninism in particular, the idea of the party and that the party, being the vanguard of the people, knows better. The worst moments of this kind of attitude came with Stalin, who perverted Marxism. That’s something that I see that Mao Zedong reversed very significantly in his theoretical writing because his idea was in some sense not only that the intellectual should work for the people but that the intellectual should learn from the people—the idea that there should be popular input into Marxism. You get similar ideas in certain other Marxists like Gramsci for example.

I see Marxism as being first of all a supreme critical instrument that allows a form of distancing from reality as it is, providing another attitude to think about it and to consider whether it is possible for things to be different and better. This critical perspective in turn rests on a kind of indisputable ethical premise which is that there ought to be some kind of social justice in the world, which means that even if people are not equal in every sense (it doesn’t mean that people are uniform) that should be a broad degree of equality between people. That ought to be people’s right, that they have something that is roughly similar to what other people have, and that there shouldn’t be huge disparities in terms of wealth, or more simply in terms of health care and education and so forth. That is what the aim of Marxism has always been, and some of that was adapted from Liberalism. It’s not exclusive to Marxism. Liberalism began with the idea that through education, there could be equality, or at least, if everybody had equal access to education, then at some level they would have equal opportunity, which is good premise. But what it misses out are the differences in the cultural background of the people who come to that education. If you come from a very educated family, where education is the norm, that’s more different than if you come from a background such as certain working class families where education is alien and unfamiliar. And then when the state makes education compulsory, even in the most well-meaning way, it is often the case among working class people in Europe and the United States, then a certain resistance to education develops because it seems to be as if the state is imposing things on you. So many people who are born into poor circumstances actually express their resistance to that situation and the society that has permitted it when they encounter the education system, particularly since in practice they tend to find themselves in the less successful schools. So you can’t just say “Let’s give everybody equal access to education, and then wash our hands and let everybody get with it as best they can” because that doesn’t work. Marxism and Marx always suggest that there is more to achieving equality than just access to education, since equality of opportunity through education can never really be equal.

And so that’s always for me been paramount in terms of my thinking of the real issues. My question is how do you bring equality about and what is it in any particular culture that prevents that from happening? What could enable us to turn around the everyday material and social life of ordinary people? I have sometimes found forms of Marxism where I have felt that people have in some sense lost the plot, that is, they have stopped thinking about the ultimate objectives because they get caught up with particular ideological issues or arguments and so forth. That’s actually been one of the reasons why I think it has been very difficult to persuade people politically in terms of global politics to adopt Marxism freely or democratically. There has been a lot of effort trying to persuade people around the world to take advantage of, let’s say socialism. But even so it is an uphill struggle. That’s a very interesting question, to my mind, what is missing from all that thinking that makes people who you might think in terms of their interests would support Marxism shy away from it? Why in other words is it not more popular?

Marxism has always been something important for me but never an ideology to whose precepts I felt so committed to that I would not allow myself to think creatively in terms of new, hitherto unthought possibilities. I always want to have some space to think for myself, and the opportunity, if I choose to take a bit of distance, to explore other possibilities, let’s say psychoanalysis, to see what they have got to offer. So in that sense I have rarely immediately rejected things, new ideas, straight off because they did not fit in with extant Marxist theory. Derrida would be another example. I didn’t just say “Oh, he is not a Marxist. I am going to reject him.” I always want to know what these people are doing, what’s going on there, and basically what’s the value there, even while at another level my values remain the same. That’s in a sense why I could afford to take an interest in Derrida, because in fact I knew my values were very certain so it did not threaten me to read or even write about Derrida.

Related to this is that I don’t like people who have a set of opinions and when some person comes along with a new idea, immediately attack them because the new idea does not correspond to the original set of opinions. This is what happened with Derrida where people said “Oh, he is not doing what I am doing, so let’s attack him.” In the same way, I listen first to what people want to say before I decide whether it is for me or not. I’m not just looking for a template of my own opinions in other writers. If you are looking for something that is exactly what you think already then there is no need to read anything new.

Sheng: So your mind is always open for new things and other alternatives.

Young: Yes, I hope so. I always try to keep my mind open in that way.

Sheng: I remember you once called yourself a socialist rather than a Marxist. That’s very interesting. Could you say something about in what sense you are not a Marxist and in what sense you are a socialist since you are now in China, a country where socialism and Marxism still prevail?

Young: Well, I suppose, I was probably thinking in the European context, at some level, because it seems to me that Marxist socialist is the best term. The relation between socialism and Marxism is a huge question that has preoccupied many political philosophers, for example Castoriadis, or more recently Peter Sloterdijk. The first issue is how to define them. A Marxist can mean many things. It can mean you are a follower of Marx. It could mean you are a member of the former Communist Party which, though international, was basically a Soviet outfit. It could mean you are somebody who sees the truth having been stated by Marx and there being nothing more to add to it. But of course this would never have been the attitude of Marx himself. I mean if he had lived a life of 150 years, he would have constantly been shifting his analyses according to historical circumstances and theoretical developments as he did in his own life. So you have that interesting question that Althusser raised of whether Marx himself was always a Marxist, and if not, what do we do with his earlier non-Marxist texts? Althusser showed that Marx is not always a Marxist, indeed he argued that he was not really a Marxist at all beforeCapital. So I guess what I am saying is that I want to have the opportunity to read Marx but not always to have to follow Marxtoutcourt. You should be able to disagree with Marx.

Whereas if you say you are a socialist by contrast, then you are making simple a political statement about your political values that do not have a pre-attached predetermined ideological identity. I don’t see socialism and Marxism as being identical, though Marxism is a form of socialism. Historically, socialism is a much older, and broader political movement. It’s for this reason that socialism can mean a lot of different things too. Typically people tend to use the term “socialist” almost as a very mild form of Marxism, as for example when they talk about the way that the European political system is really one of social democracy rather than straightforward capitalism. Marxism seems much more hard line than socialism because it tends to be associated in the popular mind with compulsion rather than consent. Socialism is an idea that will make sense to a lot of people when you talk to them because it is basically about putting social values first in a way that prioritizes the community. It’s a popular political form whereas historically Marxism has always been imposed by an elite from above. If you talk to people about Marxism, maybe it’s not something that they are going to be able to understand easily. They haven’t read Marx, and Marxism isn’t so easily translatable, if you like, to a common political discourse because it is based on a particular argument, indeed analysis, the argument ofCapital, rather than upon commonly recognized values. How many people have in fact read all three volumes ofCapitalafter all? Whereas socialism stands for something that I think almost anybody can recognize. So politically, in Europe socialism makes more sense as a term, but it can get to the stage where socialism becomes perverted and distorted, as in the Nazi’s idea of “national socialism”, or so mild that it can hardly be recognized as socialism at all, as in the case of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, at which point you want to say, “Hang on!” This isn’t socialism! You want to take the term back. So, what this suggests is that it’s tricky to get the right term. It means that you just have to define things in terms of what you believe, if that’s what for you they stand for. And that’s true for Marxism too. Marxism can mean different things for different people, so everybody needs to be clear about what they mean when they are using these terms. None of these terms, these political categories, on their own have a single meaning. They all have very broad perspectives, and cover a lot of meanings—that’s politics. If they are going to get popular support, political ideas have to be broad in order to work so that a lot of different people can identify with them. The terms Marxism and socialism don’t have fixed meanings, even if they imply a certain kind of politics, and this is obvious if you think about the history of China since 1949 and its changing relation to Marxism. The question everyone asks today of course is in what sense China is still socialist or Marxist, which remains unclear.

Sheng: What do you think of the category of the “third world”? I read that you think that after the collapse of the second world, the original third world has actually moved from its affiliation with the second world to the first. Within the last 15 years, the so-called “third world theory” has been used to justify a Chinese mode of postcolonialism, which ironically resorts to a kind of Chinese nationalism or even an essentialist “Chineseness”. Could you please comment on this phenomenon briefly?

Young: What I meant was that if according to the “three worlds” theory, the third world is balanced against and between the first and the second, then if the second has disappeared then the so-called third world no longer has any options in terms of which camp with which to affiliate.

There has been very long history of attempting to define some kind of third way that goes back to the Bandung Conference in 1955, at which China was represented. Technically the three worlds theory was invented in respect to the West, the Soviet Block, and the third-world which included the non-aligned countries. In practice, during the Cold War most of the non-aligned countries had to line up in certain way with one or the other of the two major blocks. They couldn’t avoid it. But later the term the third world came to be used in a different way: that is in the sense of the third grade world, identified with poverty and the failure of the state. It’s very hard to find a term to replace it even if one doesn’t like the the term the “third world” because it has the “grade three” meaning in it. People talk about the West and the non-West or the West and the rest. They talk about the North and the South. In recent years, with the explosion of the economies of Brazil, China, India and Russia this has all changed again. So the reason that the term the “third world” is no longer very satisfactory is also because what used to be the third world is now very very diverse in terms of economies for example. You can’t really lump everything together in the same way. It’s hard to argue that the “third world” still exists as such. So Singapore, for example, is more prosperous than most first-world countries in terms of the standard of living. So it is definitely not the third world in that sense. Then there are countries like Ethiopia or Somalia, where the standard of living is so low that it can hardly be compared to any other country. So I think we need to be aware of the huge differences between countries like China or Brazil and countries like Somalia; to put them all in the same category does not make sense. I think people realize that now, but in a sense there isn’t yet a term that describes the other different configurations. You definitely have the western block which at some level operates as a block; despite their differences, when it comes down to it, these countries still operate politically together. And then you have this large number of very diverse nonwestern countries, some of which might be operators of a similar kind of block, not necessarily economic, such as the so-called Muslim world, others not. They are all changing economically all the time as well. What might be true this year may be not true in five years time, so these days it’s very hard to find stable categories.

Is there still something called the non-western world? Yes, to the degree that there is still something called the western world, by which I mean basically Europe and the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Is Japan part of the West? Effectively it is. It always operates in consort with the western block. But at another level, of course, it is not the West. It doesn’t think itself as the West either. So it’s very hard to catch hold of these terms. You can use them as a shorthand but as soon as you start thinking them through or interrogating them, they don’t hold water. So you just have to think about what you are talking about in particular contexts. I sometimes use the term the “third world” like everybody does, but in general I try to avoid it. I try to find other ways of saying whatever it is I mean without using the term the “third world”. I try to explore alternatives and I certainly would not endorse the idea, if anybody still does, that the third world has some intrinsic similarities. It doesn’t. Maybe there was a time when it did but now it is very different. Maybe we should use the term the “third worlds”.

Your question however asks about the relation of the third world to Postcolonialism and to Chinese nationalism. In general, despite the caveats I have just made with respect to the term the “third world”, we could say that what is different about Postcolonialism is that it puts the third world first. It attempts to look at the world from the various subaltern perspectives of the third world. To the extent that China was subaltern in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, then a postcolonial perspective can be part of the larger rebalancing that Postcolonialism is trying to achieve. But as I said earlier, this can’t really be identified with a reverse Orientalism, or a new Chinese nationalism. That is simply nationalism. Postcolonialism in China would involve thinking about the situation of migrant workers, for example, or the cultural politics of minorities such as the Uighur.

Sheng: I feel that you have a strong sense of social responsibility. In your work you have shown much concern about social justice and human equality. So compared with the postcolonial critics you have studied such as Spivak and Bhabha, you seem to be much more involved in social movements or social activism. So what do you think of the postcolonial detachment from the real world, if I could put it that way? Or the social apathy of postcolonialism in general as it is criticized by many cultural theorists? To what extent are you involved in social and political activism? What parts could the postcolonial critics and theorists possibly play in the movement of making a better world for human beings?

Young: First of all, I don’t think it is true that Spivak and Bhabha are not concerned with or involved these issues. They may not say the same things but in practical terms they are. Spivak for example spends a lot of time in her involvement in developing schools for teaching teachers in India and also in China. And Homi Bhabha’s interest in human rights in particular I think is something that shows his own political commitment. Bhabha in his writing about minority human rights, gives a strong sense that there is a political purpose to his writing. He is not just writing about a poem for its own sake or anything like that. At the end of the day if you said “Why are you writing?” he would say: “I am writing because I don’t think we’ve defined the political constituency of minorities adequately: I want to make an intervention in the politics of cultural representation, offer new ideas of how it can be achieved. I want to make a political intervention at that level.”

So I think they are involved, but what I would say is that different people pursue their commitment to social justice in different ways, which is how it should be. We can’t all do it in the same way. On the other hand, there are plenty of postcolonial critics who, shall we say, at the very least don’t show much sign of it, because they tend to just use postcolonialism as a general perspective or they tend to write literary criticism about say, non-British writers or Commonwealth writers, but in the end offer a fairly conventional form of thematic literary criticism which just happens to be on ‘let’s say’ Achebe, but sometimes you feel that there is no real difference there in terms of what they are doing. The politics of Postcolonialism doesn’t come through.

So it seems to me that whatever anybody does personally, in terms of their own political activities and commitments which at some level are going to be separate, hands-on activities, there is also a degree to which people’s political commitment in that sense of activism comes through in their writing, because of the concerns they have, because of the connection they make, the issues that they foreground and so forth. Actually I think a fair number of postcolonial theorists do that. Or put it in another way, the best ones do it. I would say that there is a rough rule of thumb, that is, the more they are politically involved, the better they are as theorists. Or the better they are as theorists, the more they tend to be politically involved. I think there is a connection. Take the Irish critic David Lloyd who writes about Ireland and minority discourses, it’s really brilliant work. You can tell from his writing that he is very alert to the sort of politics of what he is doing, the broader political formations of which his work forms a part. Edward Said is obviously an example too. People who are most politically active, and who because of their involvement in that commitment, are thinking more and tend to try to re-theorize whatever the situation is, producing new theories, new accounts, new ways of thinking, and new ways of trying to solve political problems. They tend to be the people who are the most interventionist figures and I don’t see myself as being different from them. I certainly wouldn’t claim to be more political than anybody else. That’s also the kind of rather barren game some people indulge in, attacking people because they are not political enough, implying that they themselves are more political than others. I don’t like that kind of writing. I think it’s really self-indulgent and narcissistic. If you keep certain forms of politics in your head which you will do, if you are politically involved in whatever way, then that comes through in your writing because you have a sense of what issues are significant, and in postcolonial criticism or postcolonial theory, you know, that makes a difference. People who write postcolonial criticism without any commitment to political activism tend to write much flatter work and so that’s where I put the dividing line. You can just tell—it’s so obvious. With the weaker work, where there is no political call to be heard, there is no political commitment coming through. There is no sense of real world, as opposed to academic, politics...

Sheng: You have written and published in several different genres, mainly theoretical ones but also theoretical fictions, some of your works such asPostcolonialism:AVeryShortIntroduction, are very poetic and also visual in the sense that it has a lot of pictures. So how would you describe your work? Would you call it literary, theoretical, poetic, social, historical, political or all of them? Or simply postcolonial?

Young: All of them. I would like to think of it in all of these terms. Actually...but I like to think the postcolonial through in all of these ways. I mean I use the term “postcolonial” as we all do, as a sort of shorthand but it’s not a genre in itself, it’s not a particular form of fiction or history. It’s a kind of writing you do, with a certain political commitment. I suppose at that level, one thing that has been strange for me is that I come from a literature background. I am in a literature department but I don’t write very much literary criticism. Of course I have written literary criticism, I can do it if I want to. But I don’t write about literature formally, very much. In fact, I write about everything else almost except literature. I write about history, about anthropology, about philosophy, everything... On the other hand, I still think of myself as being very literary, and one of the ways I think about it is that at certain level, though I don’t write about literature, I often write anyway in a literary way, trying to use the resources of literature, of literary writing for the kind of work that I do. And the thing about literature is that it can, if you like, range across different genres and get away with it, in a way that, let’s say, history can’t. So Shakespeare can write history plays, or Shakespeare can do history if you like. But history can’t do Shakespeare.

In fact, most traditional critics, if we look back historically to earlier times, most people who wrote literary criticism also wrote other things as well. Take Matthew Arnold: he wrote literary criticism, but he also wrote poetry, and essays of different kinds. Or Coleridge, he wrote brilliant poetry but he wrote philosophy as well as literary criticism. Or De Quincey. Or Wilde. You know a lot of literary writers actually write much more than just narrowly defined literature, so why shouldn’t critics? That’s what I am trying to say. Particularly in the nineteenth century, which is the work in which I was brought up intellectually, I have always been inspired by them. I always liked writers like Coleridge and De Quincey. De Quincey wrote on economics, but he also wrote about opium eating, and many other things. I don’t see why one shouldn’t switch. But it’s only literary people who in a sense was allowed to do that; once you enter into another discipline like sociology or anthropology, then it is much more confining. Maybe anthropologists such as James Clifford are trying to get away from that, but typically you are much more controlled by your discipline than in literature. I particularly like writers who write across genres, and when I find somebody who does this, I put them in a special place. I connect to them and find them inspiring. So I take as my model writers such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes who were both able creatively to transform criticism into an art form. In my own writing I try to transgress boundaries because it enables me to do things that I couldn’t do if I just stuck within one kind of writing. For example in theVeryShortIntroductionI deliberately wrote some of it in a style so that, I was hoping anyway, the reader would be uncertain whether they were reading fiction or history: is this a real story or is it made up; is it an authentic narrative or has it been invented? We can’t quite tell sometimes—because it seems to me that history is also a kind of invented narrative. It is actually methodologically not really so different from literary narrative. It tends to exclude something, particularly the subjective, one’s own view, subjectivity, but a lot of postcolonial writing has refused that division when writing about history. People have not necessarily stuck to genres very carefully, they have tended to be more cavalier if you like. And that’s part of the literature’s power. It breaks different boundaries. It offers a wider range of kinds of experience. So that is also part of, you know, in some sense the politics of it: literature gives a kind of emotional charge that most other kinds of writing don’t. An affective charge. It can affect the reader, it produces an affect on the reader. It is supposed to be emotionally persuasive and so that’s what I try to do myself. And then at another level, it is just that I love what language can do. In that sense I am also still very literary. It’s a pleasure for me to be able to try using the resources of language and that’s one connection I would make with Homi Bhabha—you know, he is very poetic writer. People say to me we can’t understand his theory. I tell them, well try to read it as poetry. Then you will be fine. You wouldn’t expect to understand poetry analytically. You can read a poem with the feeling that you don’t understand all of it and somehow that incomprehensibility even helps you to enjoy it for the affect that it has. So read it as a poem.

I hate it when people write about literature particularly, when they write in such a way that there is no sense of sensitivity to language or the pleasure of language in their own writing. Too dry, just dull, plain bad, plain boring prose.... Let’s say I am reading a critical essay about Joyce, or some other brilliant writer, and the critical writing is completely flat and the writer himself has no sense of language, then I actually just get impatient. I feel that this person has simply missed the point. Joyce is a literary writer and he has just been reduced to an analysis of the content or whatever, without some sense of the language, of the literary qualities that make Joyce such a pleasure to read. The critic has missed the point. To tell you the truth, I don’t really see the point of writing about literature unless you can make it better than the literary text. Otherwise I would just prefer to read the original! Yes, generally I prefer to read the original books than to read a critical essay about them, which is in part why I don’t write about literature myself directly. I am not saying that I haven’t learned a lot from many works of literary criticism, because I have. But I just in general feel more and more that when I read literary criticism I would prefer to be reading the original. If you ask me: what would you prefer to read,Hamletor an essay onHamlet? I prefer to readHamletitself. I may not be having the same perceptions as the essay, but I would get more pleasure probably from readingHamlet. The test of good literary criticism should be like this... Is it actually so good, if not better than reading Hamlet, that it gives you the same kind of pleasure or charge or excitement as readingHamletor gets close to it. So that you don’t mind not readingHamletfor a bit when reading the critical work. And some criticism, you know really good criticism is like that. It is engaging, it is brilliantly written. So you feel it’s worthwhile spending the time with it. Most literary criticism for me doesn’t have that quality. People always say when books are made into films, “Oh the film is not as good as the book”. I feel the same about the relation between literary criticism and literature. And I think that would be a good test actually because if every literary critic thought of that, then he or she would force everybody, including myself, to write better literary criticism. It has got to be as good as the original book! So that’s why I tend not to write literary criticism because I don’t think normally I can write as well as Shakespeare... [chuckle...]

Sheng: Haha...but you are also a creative writer. You write poems.

Young: Yes that’s true. I also write poems.

Sheng: Have you published any poems?

Young: Yes, I have published some poems. I haven’t published any whole book of poems, but I have published some poems in magazines and journals.

Sheng: Have you written enough poems for a collection to be published?

Young: Oh yes, many. If I could at some point I’d love to put my poems together into a collection. I’d like to do that. Always I have so many other things to do, but I’d love to if it ever happens. I’ve never really tried very hard but it would be exciting and a real pleasure.

Sheng: Anyway, writing poetry itself for you is a pleasure.

Young: Yes, it is a pleasure, but it is also important for me to express a certain part of me and to translate it into words. It’s something that people particularly in literature departments, students, should be encouraged to do: to think about creating literature. However bad you might be, at least, you come to understand more of what it is all about if you try to write some poems yourself. But a ridiculous separation has developed between critics and artists. I think literary criticism should be another form of literature: the critic as artist. It doesn’t make any sense to me to separate them. It’s an academic invention really, but it is bizarre one because it is the product of institutions and disciplinary divisions gone mad.

Sheng: This unnaturalness, this bizarre situation of the discipline, could we also call it a consequence of modernity?

Young: Possibly. To the extent that the university and the disciplines are part of modernity, then yes. I mean it’s a product of the division of disciplines so that activities become so specialized. Rather than write poems, you write about poems. You can’t do both. It’s really ridiculous to me. In Europe that happens very early in life: if you study English for your examinations, you very quickly stop being taught how to write literature. You are not taught to write poems. You are taught to appreciate literary works. Self-expression is encouraged when you are small, but then disencouraged as you grow older. Of course all that is also a political thing. It puts everybody in the position of a relative passivity. They can’t be the artist, the artist is romantic, special, and so forth. I am not saying that writing should be part of the examination curriculum, but people should be encouraged to write. With my students in fact I always try to say to them: “Remember, when you write your papers, your essays, think of yourself as a writer. Don’t just write me a paper. Use your imagination. Think of yourself as a writer just like the person who you are writing your paper on”. Sometimes they can’t do it, but I try to encourage them to think of their essays as writing. Sometimes for example, when I was in Oxford, where I did a lot of teaching literature—I used to teachEnglishLiteraturefrom1740tothepresentday—I encouraged them to write pastiche rather than critical essays. I would say: write me a piece like Joyce, write in the style of Joyce, just to get them into the idea of taking more trouble to respond to the text in a literary way. And actually in Oxford where we had exams at the end of the three years course, people who wrote their critical essays in a more literary way, or had a kind of literary style, always did better. So in the end it paid off, they got better marks too—because the examiners enjoyed reading their papers. Their essays were a pleasure to read so they got better grades. So I wasn’t doing them down by encouraging them to think of themselves as writers, in fact the reverse is true.

Sheng: Thank you. Could you also say a few words about the future of postcolonialism?

Young: There was a discussion in thePMLAsometime last year, which was about the future of postcolonialism. They invited a number of people who have in fact written works in postcolonialism to comment on the future of postcolonialism. In all their discussion, none of them admitted to being a postcolonial critic him or herself. They kept saying “they should do this and they should do that.” What was extraordinary about it was, while they seemed to be saying “well, it is finished”, that they all saw it as purely academic activity within the United States. I didn’t recognize postcolonial theory in their discussion. First of all, they were talking completely within academic boundaries. Secondly, they never mentioned anything outside the United States: they talked about it as if it were just some US-centered activity with no reference to an elsewhere—the postcolonial! Anyway, this piece did discourage people, and I’m not surprised. It put some students off.

I think at one level, postcolonial studies sometimes is a victim of its own success, because it has become so taken up in others disciplines, it’s sometimes hard to know quite what is the centre of postcolonial studies anymore since you can find it everywhere—even in medieval studies and theology. I think it is the case that the big theoretical models that Said and Spivak and Bhabha made are not constantly being remade and re-invented; and also that there are other issues coming in that people want to talk about—diaspora and transnational studies, animal studies and so forth, endless new terms are always coming up and that makes it quite hard to say what is the future of postcolonial studies. I think this is in some respects quite helpful though, because those who choose to remain within postcolonial studies will be those who have a commitment to its politics. If you think of it in terms of global justice, then there is still a long way to go before postcolonial studies’ work is finished because the world is still very unjust and it is also still culturally very unbalanced. The subaltern cultures of the world are still devalued, they are not given full value at all. There is still a huge amount of work to do in both realms. Third point, there is still a lot of historical work to be done in terms of retrieval of the cultural work of the anti-colonial movement.

So all these things seem to me to need to go on, whether they would necessarily be called postcolonial or not. In some sense it doesn’t really bother me so long as the things themselves can continue but it seems to me the postcolonial still best serves those interests because it still has its foundations in a certain political history and seeks to achieve results in certain things. Actually there are not many intellectual positions or perspectives that explicitly say they are committed to this kind of issues or those kinds of values. If I say transnational studies, it doesn’t stand for anything politically beyond antinationalism. If I say diaspora studies, then I can look at the diasporas across the world and their cultures. These terms are simply describing either the focus or the perspective but they don’t actually stand for anything beyond that, whereas postcolonial studies actually does. To that extent it will continue, it will endure so long as it stands for those kinds of values. You might say “well it should be called ‘world socialism’.” But what it keeps in is the whole cultural area, the whole cultural focus, the whole historical retrieval of the intellectual work that it is doing—it’s both political work and intellectual work at the same time. So from my point of view the future is in some sense the same but more, because there is a lot of work that still needs doing. Its work is by no means done. I don’t, I can’t say that it is going to transform itself. I am sure new theories and ways of doing thing will come along and I hope that it will be flexible enough to take those on board. I hope it will transform itself in terms of the way it does things, or the things it emphasizes. But at the end of the day its values must stay the same I think. It will keep its core identity. There are ways though in which it will have to take on new issues. It has failed, so far, for example, to understand the new forms of resistance based in religion. I think that if postcolonialism has any big challenge that it needs to deal with more adequately in fact it is that resistance to power, broadly speaking, globally now is religious rather than any other kind of political form. So far, postcolonialism hasn’t had much to say about that. That seems to me to be its real weakness, and that’s something that needs to be thought through. In fact, many of the social and even political issues that get raised in that context cross over, but modern forms of anticolonial or anti-Western resistance in their fundamentalist or Islamicist form, have basically adapted, adopted, and appropriated much of the language of anticolonialism.

You could say also that the contemporary resort to violence is also one anticolonial strategy and that’s something I try to think about quite a lot, the choice that the anticolonial activists made between violence and nonviolence and the necessity to re-apprise the use of the power of nonviolence over violence in the contemporary context. Maybe looking at the tradition of nonviolence from a postcolonial point of view can help people articulate the way of nonviolence as a more effective form than that of violence, which only leads inexorably to more violence in my view. That’s the problem with violence, which is also the big challenge in responding to it. This is the difficult issue that in the future postcolonialism has got to deal with. It’s difficult to deal with and it is not surprising that most people avoid it. It’s very tough.

Sheng: You have mentioned earlier in you talk that postcolonial studies have already touched the field of theology. Could you also elaborate a bit more on this issue since Chinese audience may not be very familiar with this?

Young: The idea that postcolonial theory really involves different sets of concepts designed to solve or to re-consider particular problems is one reason why, as I said at the beginning, it has been taken up across so many disciplines. Its non-Eurocentric position allows people a means through which to re-think certain issues and to speak from their different perspectives. Nevertheless it’s quite remarkable really that something like postcolonial theory should have become so picked up by so many different people across so many different disciplines. The only other example I can think of historically in the last 50 years perhaps would be structuralism. That was a much more specific methodology, but it also provided a radically different perspective. In general, though, it doesn’t happen very often that way.

But in answer to your specific question, which was about theology. I first encountered postcolonial theology when I was asked to give a talk on postcolonialism at the Lambeth Conference last year. The Lambeth Conference is held every ten years by the Anglican church, a global organization of protestant Episcopal churches. At this conference, bishops come from all over the world to discuss theological or institutional topics of the day—this time the question was about whether gay priests should be tolerated. The Anglican Church, as its name still suggests, is led by the Church of England. They changed the name of the global organization from the Church of England to the Anglican Church to make it sound more equitable. However, also in play was the fact the Church of England has a colonial history. When Britain colonized different places around the world, the authorities typically set up Anglican churches, for the British residents or settlers. For example today if you go to India you will still see gothic churches of the Anglican kind here and there in the larger cities. There were also missionaries (of various denominations) who went out in order to convert the local people. By the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the political rationales and justifications for colonialism involved the spread of Christianity; some people used that idea as an excuse for colonial rule. So there is a long history of interrelation between that church and colonization. Now the colonies have gone, but the Anglican Church lives on around the world. The feeling remains, however, that the Anglican Church, and of course this is true for Christianity in general, not only the Anglican Church, has never really confronted its own role in the history of colonization, which today of course people have a very different view of. The Church played its part in colonial history, but whereas in British culture there has been a long reevaluation of the role of Britain historically and culturally according to its colonial history and in some sense that is what postcolonialism is about, the Anglican Church has never seriously come to terms with its own role and that history. And that’s why they were interested in talking about postcolonialism, because they now want to address these issues. As an example of the continuing global reach of the Anglican church, one of the people at Lambeth, who was a discussant of my lecture, was in fact the bishop of Peshawar. Himself a Pakistani, he is a bishop in Pakistan in the Taleban dominated territory of northern Pakistan even today. That was amazing to me, especially as Peshawar is the place I write about at the beginning of myPostcolonialism:AVeryShortIntroduction. Beyond that colonial history, the point about a postcolonial theology is to foreground the fact that Christianity was a religion that originated outside what is now the West: what does it look like from a non-Western perspective?

Sheng: In your very original workPostcolonialism:AHistoricalIntroduction(2001), which was translated into traditional Chinese and published in Taiwan in 2006, you have had a historical narrative of different kinds of anti-colonial forms and included such famous political figures as Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong, which is very different from the discursive analyses practiced by many other postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. So could we call it a kind of grand narrative of postcolonialism? Would you elaborate about the purpose of putting all kinds of postcolonial forms into one grand narrative form? Are you somehow inspired by Fredric Jameson with his grand narrative of Marxism?

Young: Thank you. One of the difficulties in writing that book was that when I looked at all these different histories, I needed some way of holding them together or some framework if you like, into which to put these histories, without however making them part of a single history, which they weren’t. What was the relation, for example, of Chinese Resistance to the Japanese to Nkrumah’s resistance to the British? These were completely disparate historical events you might say. And yet, from another perspective, they had a similarity. They were both examples of people fighting external powers which had invaded their countries and sought to control them. So at one level, they were very different. At another level they had a structural similarity in terms of colonial rule. It was difficult for me to turn it into a single narrative and I didn’t want to turn it into a very tight single narrative anyway. Also of course I had written a book myself (WhiteMythologies:WritingHistoryandtheWest, 1990) attacking ideas of history which put history into a single Eurocentric framework. So I had to be alert to that. Nevertheless, what I did to a degree was to produce a narrative of a kind, even though it was a narrative of disparate moments which changed significantly at particular dates in response to particular historical events.

So for example, in the history of anticolonial struggle, broadly speaking, most people articulating anticolonial ideas, that’s not to say resisting colonialism physically but actually writing about it, came from Europe and the Americas, up until the twentieth century. That was the dominant form. And I found in fact many Europeans who resisted colonialism. Not all Europeans thought imperialism was a wonderful thing: there was a lot of opposition to colonialism within Europe, going right back to Bartolomé de las Casas from Spain in the sixteenth century, including people like Edmund Burke and Adam Smith in Britain, Marx and others in the nineteenth century, and so forth. So there is a whole line of resistance there. But from 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution, things changed dramatically which shifted the whole trajectory of the narrative into a new mode entirely. After the Russian Revolution, suddenly people in colonized countries had a chance because here was a country that was actively anti-imperialist. Up to that point, no state had offered colonized peoples moral or physical support in their resistance to their colonizers. So if any colonized state had succeeded in physically, militarily removing a particular colonial power, there would have always been another colonial power who would have taken the opportunity to move in and take its place. So the intervention of the Soviet Union was very very important because it offered the first real prospect of freedom and national sovereignty. But in practice, after the rise of Stalin, the Soviet Union wasn’t actually very effective in promoting anticolonial struggle because of its rigid doctrinal ideology which did not sit well with the realities of colonial countries. Nevertheless it did create a kind of fulcrum so that from 1917 onwards, almost everybody who was resisting colonialism and was seeking to remove colonizing powers, turned to the Soviet Union as their ally and turned to a form of Marxism of one kind or another, because it was Marxism, and Marxism alone, that offered an anti-imperial political ideology. So it was a grand narrative of a sort, but it was also a grand narrative which happened to be true. And it really did happen. After 1917, the dominant form of anticolonialism became Marxist. However, there were also exceptions and a big exception that I write about in my book was Gandhi in India. For various reasons, in India, the Marxists, the Indian Communist Party, were not at all significantly involved in the anticolonial struggle. It was actually the Congress Party and Gandhi in particular who developed a whole new form of struggle, which was one of exercising peaceful forms of resistance. That is another narrative that I tell that in terms of colonial struggle: the division between what the Irish called “moral force” and violent struggle. That’s another way of looking at the anticolonial struggle, in terms of methods used. Basically you had to choose one or the other: those were the two possible methods.

So anticolonial struggle was a narrative that one could see as a totality of a kind. I don’t object to that, and to that extent I am with Jameson that there can be grand narratives, in the plural. Anticolonialism is the grand narrative of one particular historical struggle. It’s not a narrative of everything that happened in the world, but rather a particular thread for which there was a grand narrative. And I think it was also a grand narrative in another sense that I try to suggest, which is that it was a very noble narrative because when you think about it, all that people were struggling for was a form of autonomy, decency, the kind of life that everybody wants to live, where you are not subject to some foreign power arbitrarily controlling you and putting you down. The colonial subjects didn’t actually ask for very much. They only wanted some kind of participation in the government of their own country. They wanted some kind of participation in ruling their own lives. And for that relatively straightforward and not very radical demand, they had to really struggle. In that struggle, thousands and thousands of people lost their lives and suffered in countless ways. So I think it was a grand narrative from that point of view and the result of that narrative is that by the end of twentieth century, we could say that with a few exceptions colonialism is largely over. So I would be perfectly happy to call it a grand narrative. I have never actually been someone who has been confused about the anti-foundational force of postmodernism because I think too if you have a historical perspective, you can always see certain kinds of foundations. So I have never been altogether persuaded by the anti-foundational argument.

Sheng: What is the relationship between postcolonialism and modernity or modernities? Do you think that the writers of postcolonialism have deconstructed singular modernity and paved the way for multiple modernities?

Young: Yes, that has been very strong in India in particular, the idea that we should think about modernity not as a single entity or a single moment but rather as a whole set of different forms of modernity or what has been called alternative modernities, all of which, as it were, interrelated and in some sense shared the fact of modernity. I think modernity does constitute a single phase, but it is also the case that modernity didn’t take the same forms and didn’t embody the same entities for the whole world. That would be a postcolonial reading of modernity: to suggest alternative modernities operating within the general orbit of modernity itself.

In terms of the relation of postcolonialism to postmodernism, I would emphasize the difference that I have already alluded to: postmodernism has developed forms of anti-foundational thinking, which is very different from postcolonialism, which in my view is very strongly foundational, it is very strongly material. And to that extent the two shouldn’t be confused. Inevitably because they are both terms that begin with a “post-”, people do put them together, but they seem to me to be antithetical forms.

Sheng: My next question has also to do with modernity. You’ve mentioned in your lecture the ethical drive of postcolonialism, the transformation of economic patterns in the colonized countries and in general various kinds of social injustice created by colonialism, which in many respects shares the concerns of ecocriticism. Then would you please say more about this ethical drive of postcolonialism in the globalized world in relation to ecocriticism?

Young: One of the heroes of the ecology movement is Gandhi. If you look at the history of anticolonial thinkers, some of them such as Gandhi did develop an idea of the world whose politics involved questions of ecology. Gandhi was very critical of modernity because of its ideology of triumphing over nature. Sometimes absurdly so in fact; for example, he spent a whole chapter in his anticolonial bookHindSwarajcondemning trains, which he then used himself in order to rally political support for his cause for the rest of his life. But he did emphasize the idea that industrialization, and the forms of modernity that induct us into consumerism, have the serious cost of harming the environment; equally that you don’t need to run to some of the forms of industrialization in order to solve local problems. One of the mistakes people now feel about the leaders of many of the decolonized countries, Nehru himself in India or Nasser in Egypt, was that they too easily bought the idea of modernity and that the way forward would be to access their countries into modernity and that the way to achieve modernity was to embark on huge infrastructural projects which required lots of experts from outside. On these occasions, typically the knowledge of local people would be disregarded, and only later would the local, ecological knowledge come into play. So for example in India, they would come in and plant eucalyptus trees because they were said to be fast-growing and more productive. But in fact they destroy the whole ecosystem of the ground in which they grow, destroying all the ecosystems on the forest floor. Gandhi was a person who was very alert to those issues and to that extent he is now the forerunner of contemporary development theory, which seeks to start from local knowledge, as well as eco-theory.

So there is a strong link between ecocriticism and the arguments developed in anticolonial thinking. Another example would be Amílcar Cabral, leader of Guinea-Bissau’s independence movement in West Africa, who was assassinated by the Portuguese. He was an agronomist, and his job in fact involved going round the countryside advising on farming practices. In doing so, he literally covered the entire country physically, which gave him local knowledge that came in very handy during the independence struggle. He was an early advocate of the idea that in fact local people often knew best about local conditions rather than technical experts brought in from outside. While they were fighting the Portuguese, Cabral and his troops also taught local farmers better crop-growing techniques—techniques that Cabral himself had learnt from his local experience.

Both postcolonialism and ecocriticism critique some of the ideas of modernity which identifies progress with the use of technology. The other related problem about modernity is that as soon as you invent the idea of modernity, you also immediately designate a whole area of places or people who are not modern. So modernity is a concept that divides the world up. This can be related to one of the terms that is used even in postcolonial theory which I don’t like myself—“the Other.” In recent years, there has been a lot of the discussion of “the Other”. I don’t think there are any others. “The other” is an invented category of people, who you have decided to call the other. They don’t exist. And modernity is one of the ways in which people get called the other because they are characterized as “primitive”, which is the opposite of modernity. Implicitly this division often extends to the difference between the people of the city and those of the countryside. So ecocriticism and ideas of ecology in some sense as I see it try to break down the division between modernity and the primitive because they are both ideological categories, if you like: as soon as you see that modernity is set against an idea of the primitive, then that makes you think twice about modernity. And actually the so-called primitive people as we know have a lot of knowledge. Both postcolonialism and ecocriticism recognize the ways in which knowledge is limited in practice by the institutions, such as universities, that authorize it, cutting out or devaluing huge amounts of knowledge in the world. For example, it was from Bolivian peasants that the idea of using quinine, which is derived from the cinchona plant, as a prophylactic for malaria was first discovered. There have been many examples recently of the kind in which the American company Monsanto tried to trade mark all sorts of South Asian Indian spices such as turmeric, because they discovered that turmeric has certain beneficial medical properties. So there is a big area of sympathy between ideas operating within certain forms of postcoloniality and ecology, ecocriticism. One other idea that probably would not go down very well in China given its culinary habits is the focus on the lives of animals. Although postcolonialism does not play a part in animal criticism, it is sympathetic to it because it recognizes that our ideas of the human and our ideas of the animal are interrelated. The better we treat animals, the more human we become. One way of thinking about human beings that has led to atrocities in the past is precisely that some humans have been characterized as not only primitive, but because primitive then sub-human, little better than animals. If we think of animals as beings in themselves also, that prevents us from invoking the category of the sub-human. Postcolonialism advocates what Frantz Fanon called a new humanism, which includes all, not just some, of humanity. To do that, we have to stop drawing absolute boundaries between humans and animals—for human beings are animals too.

Sheng: This is almost the end of the interview, but since this interview will be published in Chinese and in China, do you have anything else to say to Chinese audience that I have missed?

Young: I would like to, though I feel that I am very much still in a learning phase about China. One thing that intrigues me is the Chinese interest in postcolonialism itself—I haven’t really got a sense yet of where the main points of interest lie. Everywhere I go in the world where there is an interest in postcolonialism, there is always a particular, local configuration beyond the general interest. So what is the Chinese take on postcolonialism? It could be the simple reversal of perspective from a Western or Eurocentric view to a non-Occidental one; or it could be in relation to the history of China and its semi-colonization by the imperial powers and of course Japan during the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, including episodes such as the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901); or it could be a growing interest in exploring the cultural diversity of China, and the role of minorities and others in the state, particularly on the Western periphery; or it could relate to the huge Chinese Diaspora and their differing cultural identities from those on the mainland. It could be any or all of these things—but I have still to find out.