Reading Young!

I have some issues with Young"s classifications in general and will randomly look at some of them:

1- Migration:

Portraying colonialists as "modern day migrants" (P.20) is conceptually confusing and creates a lingual/knowledge based regrouping which is epistemologically unsound! Modern day migrants adhere to norms of the host society, and follow their rules, only criminal migrant elements covertly question the host's societal system, colonialist overtly and collectively and violently shattered the hosts' societal system. Power/hegemony has been taken away from the equation, by Young, which neither makes the argument modern nor post-modern, it just omits an omnipresent variable disappear from his writing and makes his writing more vulnerable!

Forced migration does not apply to slavery; slavery was in every sense reduction of humans to means of production, to be used by other humans to create surplus value (oxen, plough etc). Had slaves been forced migrants on arrival on the port of entry they could choose their course of actions like Irish in The USA. Slaves were either bought or kidnapped, any migrant has, however limited, a choice in entering a work contract...(Mexican seasonal workers in the USA once they cross the border). This again is a case of taking power arbitrarily out of the equation, which makes his work look inaccurate.

Imperialism:
With imperialism, a lingual/ knowledge power game is played, in that imperialism, and its use was introduced by critiques of monopoly/finance capital in the first place. In this sense imperialism has nothing to do with empires and imperials, it refers to a stage in capitalism that in its trajectory becomes MNC.

He also does the same thing with colonialism and talks about ethnic minorities in a national setting as internal colony, this is also a misleading classification; Azeri Turks of Iran have been living side by side with the Parsis for as long as history goes, at times they had their own kingdoms ruling the whole country. Bundling ethic minorities in their modern nation state setting with colonial conquest shows lack of historical perspective in the writer's part. His classification methodology is based on consistently reducing, denying and omitting power from the relationship.

Haideh