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.