R. Radhakrishnan

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, commonly known as R. Radhakrishnan, is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and is considered one of the leading postcolonial theorists and literary critics in the United States. He was born on 28 October 1949, in Sirkali, a village in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Radhakrishnan is also noted as a translator and poet of Tamil as well as a master of English and English literary criticism. He was initially educated in Madras and earned his PhD from Binghamton University.

History, the Human, and the World Between brings Radhakrishnan closer than ever to a more conventional unified book, being divided between three long chapters and a multipurpose introduction, yet it remains essentially a collection of essays. As well as a critical engagement with many of the most powerful influences on his thought, this book marks somewhat of a departure for Radhakrishnan, a move away from poststructuralist methodology and towards (or perhaps back to) phenomenology, albeit in an updated, modified form. In this sense, being an extended meditation on "between-ness" in all its senses refracted through the lens of phenomenology and critically juxtaposing the works of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Adrienne Rich, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, David Harvey, and Ranajit Guha, in spite of the elaborate structure of its arguments and its familiar density, History, the Human, and the World can be fairly said to have a more cohesive unifying theme and critical agenda than Radhakrishnan's earlier books, and to represent an exciting new phase in his original contribution to postcolonial theory and critical theory generally.