Preface

Summary

It is hardly necessary to emphasize the links between Anglophone postcolonial theorists and postmodern critics, who all belong to the same heritage of ‘French theory’ that was widespread in American universities during the 1980s. Those links are all the more conspicuous as French academics have been (and sometimes still are) hostile to postmodern and postcolonial studies, even though these disciplines were founded by thinkers such as Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Fanon, Sartre, Memmi and Césaire. French and comparative departments in American universities still owe much to Derridean deconstruction, though Edward Said mounts a compelling opposition to this way of thinking. Orientalism (1978), his groundbreaking essay in the postcolonial field, was much more influenced by Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The Derridean filiation is rather to be found in the work of Spivak, who translated De la grammatologie (Derrida 1976 [1967]), and in that of Homi K. Bhabha (1994) and Robert Young (1995, 1999). Nevertheless, Said's criticism of Western ethnocentric discourse appears to be a form of ‘deconstruction’ in its way. Thus, most essays, anthologies and introductions to postcolonial studies lay stress on the major role played by so-called postmodern thinkers in the postcolonial arena – Derrida and Foucault, certainly, but also Deleuze, Lyotard and Baudrillard.

The Blind Spot in Postcolonial Theory

The study of forms and genres as theoretical subjects might be one way of bringing postcolonial criticism nearer to the postmodern. Postmodern and postcolonial texts are concerned with style – in particular, with form and genre. Critics usually comment on Walcott’s inventiveness, Soyinka’s linguistic achievement, Rushdie's baroque realism. The ‘loi du genre’ [‘law of genre’] is central in Derrida’s thought (1980, 1986). Like Nietzsche, Derrida discovers new genres of philosophical discourse and explores new ways of thinking. Lyotard and Baudrillard themselves offer unexpected ways of writing and thinking about genre, as does Barthes.