One of the key premises of this book has been that the term ‘francophone literature’ can be conceptualised as a branch of postcolonial literature, rather than as being somehow connected to the national literature of France. In his important book, Postcolonial Criticism, Nicholas Harrison has argued that the term ‘francophone literature’, ‘freighted as it is with confused assumptions about “representativity”, French, literature and national identity, is redundant’. He comes to this conclusion because he believes that the ways in which languages are shared across space and time are too complex to be explained in terms of ‘a general identity’. So what Harrison is really baulking at is the notion of a general francophone identity, not the complexity of the overlapping histories or the diversity of subject positions that may be discernible within any given francophone text. Whether or not it is preferable to think of the body of texts discussed here as forming a single literature or several distinct literatures, then, remains an open question. But it is not one that simply disappears when we choose to approach the literature with the preoccupations of postcolonial theory uppermost in our minds.

In the book that is generally accredited with having launched the discipline of postcolonial studies, Orientalism, Edward Saïd's argument centres on discursive practices. The Orient comes to be constituted as an object of Western discourse through the practice and performance of various types of discourse about the Orient.