Introduction: a few liminal remarks
Summary
Slow down! Pitfalls ahead
Such has been the breathtaking pace of developments in what is broadly referred to as postcolonial theory that it is almost surprising to recall the relatively recent occurrence of these developments. Indeed, the more comparative approaches that are taken for granted in postcolonial theory, such as the now well established field of Francophone postcolonial studies, have entered only fairly late into the game, after a decade or so of largely Anglophone-based research and criticism. It may, on reflection, come as a further surprise that the dialogues now informing debates among postcolonial writers, critics and intellectuals did not begin much earlier, given that so much of the founding and defining work of the major figures in the field, such as Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, owes a clear intellectual debt to an earlier generation of French theorists (Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to name only those we have come to associate with postcolonial theory). As if to remedy retrospectively this lacuna in the intellectual history of the period, a number of commentators have recently attempted to map out genealogical lines of influence and indebtedness, whereby the origins of many of the key concepts and overriding concerns of postcolonial theory can in fact be traced back to a predominantly French or Francophone context. This has certainly led to a greater appreciation of the ways in which French theory has been adapted and redeployed: we may cite as familiar examples Bhabha drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis to enrich Frantz Fanon's insights, or Said's early use of Foucault to underpin his own groundbreaking theories of Orientalism, or Valentin Mudimbe's complex debts to Jean-Paul Sartre, Foucault and Lévi-Strauss, or Edouard Glissant's reworking of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the rhizome and deterritorialization. Within this revisionist intellectual history of the emergence of postcolonial theory, however, Jacques Derrida's writing has had a much more uncertain status. This book is an attempt to understand better just what is at stake in this uneasy encounter between deconstruction and ‘the postcolonial’.
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- Deconstruction and the PostcolonialAt the Limits of Theory, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007