A postcolonial aesthetic? An interview with Robert Young

In an interview at Monash University on 15 September, 2011, Professor Robert Young discusses questions surrounding the possibility of a postcolonial aesthetic , as originally put forward by Elleke Boehmer, and taken up by various other critics, including Chandani Lokuge. Young highlights the danger of ignoring questions of aesthetics within critical literary studies. He examines the notion of a distinct aesthetic in postcolonial writing as influenced not only by language and culture, but also by the experiences that constitute the postcolonial: hybridity, trauma, dislocation and the experience of the third space. While he rejects the notion of a unified aesthetic within postcolonial texts, Young explores the nature of this experience and the possibility of writing subjectively from within it. He expands in particular upon his work on the third space, and anxieties of language in postcolonial writing, to illustrate the manner in which critical studies of the postcolonial can (and should) involve creative forms of thinking.