1st Edition
The Anticolonial Linguistics of Nikolai Marr A Critical Reader
The archaeologist, philologist, and Linguistics theoretician Nikolai Marr (1865-1934) has attracted increasing scholarly attention as a pivotal figure of late-tsarist and early Soviet cultural politics and as an early anticolonial theorist. He remains, however, an elusive thinker who is much written about but seldom read. This volume offers a representative selection of Marr’s writing from several stages of his life translated here for the first time into English.
The selection of texts allows the reader to trace the key evolving and interconnected preoccupations that animate Marr’s vast oeuvre: his anti-nationalist valorization of the cultural and linguistic hybridity of the Caucasus, his denunciation of the imperialist complicity of Western European comparative linguistics, his anti-Darwinian emphasis on mixture and convergence in place of filial descent within the history of languages, and his unorthodox theories of linguistic origins in gesture rather than speech. Key Marrist terms such as ‘Japhetidology’, or the rejection of the prevalent theory of an Indo-European language family, are clarified. The volume contains original essays that contextualize Marr’s work within the history of linguistics, showing the indebtedness and applicability of his ideas to traditions that are frequently held to be unrelated to one another: Russian proto-structuralism, French deconstruction, and Indian subaltern thought.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Introduction: Resituating Nikolai Marr
Robert J. C. Young
1. Japhetic Languages
Nikolai Marr
2. On the question of the tasks of Armenian Studies
Nikolai Marr and Anna Kurkova
3. The Japhetites
Nikolai Marr and Anna Kurkova
4. Main Achievements of the Japhetic Theory
Nikolai Marr and Anna Kurkova
5. On the origin of languages
Nikolai Marr and Anna Kurkova
6. Nikolai Marr’s Critique of Indo-European Philology and the Subaltern Critique of Brahman Nationalism in Colonial India
Craig Brandist
7. If Vico Had Read Engels He Would Be Called Nikolai Marr
Patrick Sériot and Matthew Carson Allen
8. Japhetic grammatology: Marr, Derrida and Archi-writing
Matthew Carson Allen
9. Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Article “Experience Based on a Study of Demand among Kolkhoz Workers”
Anna Balysheva
10. “Experience Based on a Study of Demand among Kolkhoz Workers”
Mikhail Bakhtin
Biography
Matthew Carson Allen holds a PhD in French Studies from Warwick University. His dissertation examined the challenges to universalism offered by thinkers from the global periphery including Nikolai Marr and the Haitian intellectual Anténor Firmin. He currently teaches French at secondary school level.
Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. His writings address literature, postcolonial theory, cultural and political history, and psychoanalysis; they are animated by an interest in the forms of thought adopted by people who are subject to marginalization.
