Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities with the patterns of thought which characterised Victorian racial theory. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialised thinking of the past, Colonial Desire shows we are operating in complicity with historical ways of viewing ‘the other’, both sexually and racially.

Colonial Desire is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and ‘culture’. Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. ‘Englishness’, Young argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

978-0415053747
Routledge

Translations

French: ‘Le colonialisme et la machine’ désirante
(traduction de chapitre 7, ‘Colonialism and the Desiring Machine’)
Traduit par Isabelle Lee, 1998

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Portuguese (Brasilian): Desejo Colonial: Hibridismo em Teoria, Cultura e Raça, tradução Sérgio Medeiros (coord.), Dirce Waltrick do Amarante e Rafael Azize
(São Paolo: Editora Perspectiva, 2005)

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