While postcolonial theory uses certain concepts from post-structuralism to achieve this, Young argues that post-structuralism itself involved an anti-colonial critique of Western philosophy, pointing to the role played by the experience of the Algerian War of Independence in the lives of many French philosophers of that generation, including Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Althusser, and Bourdieu.
White Mythologies was the first book to characterise postcolonial theory as a field in itself, and to identify the work of Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha and the Subaltern Studies historians as its intellectual core.
Young demonstrates the extent to which racial theory was always developed in historical, scientific and cultural terms, and argues that this complex formation accounts for the ability of racialised thinking to survive into the modern era despite all the attempts made since 1945 to refute it.
[11] Stressing the significance of the work of the Third International, as well as Mao Zedong's reorientation of the landless peasant as the revolutionary subject, Young points to the importance of the Havana Tricontinental of 1966 as the first independent coming together of the three continents of the South—Africa, Asia and Latin America—in political solidarity, and argues that this was the moment in which what is now called 'postcolonial theory' was first formally constituted as a specific knowledge-base of non-Western political and cultural production.
These examples emphasise issues of migration, gender, language, indigenous rights, 'development' and ecology as well as addressing the more usual postcolonial ideas of ambivalence, hybridity, orientalism and subalternity.
To answer this question, Young reconsiders the way that English identity was classified in historical and racial terms in the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, Young argues, its broad principle of inclusiveness also helps to explain why Britain has been able to transform itself into one of the more integrated, or hybridized, of modern multiethnic nations.