The Anticolonial Linguistics of Nikolai Marr

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.

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.

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