Robert J.C. Young

I have always identified with people who live on the margins or peripheries of society, surviving in difficult and uncertain conditions. What forms of philosophical knowledge do such communities produce? In what ways do they represent themselves and articulate their specific concerns--personal, social, political, and aesthetic? How might we retrieve their histories when they often seem to have almost disappeared without trace in the past? How might we revise the forms of knowledge that circulate in the academy in order to learn from them? Can we find places where such philosophical knowledge has already emerged from within? Can our writing contribute to the righting of injustices of the present and of the past? Trying to answer such questions requires us to rethink, decolonize some of our practices of literary, cultural and historical analysis, and constantly challenges us to ask what the objects of our analysis should be.