One of the most significant recent developments within postcolonial theory has been its belated engagement with the Francophone world, after a decade or more of sustained critical attention to Anglophone texts and contexts. Indeed, one might have expected the dialogues that are now taking place to have begun much earlier, given that so much of the writing of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory – Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak – owes a clear intellectual debt to an earlier generation of French theorists. A number of genealogical lines of influence are now beginning to be drawn, and within this narrative, one more or less accepted view is that postcolonialism cut its theoretical teeth in the wake of ‘poststructuralism’ (a category that seems to include any French theorist writing from about 1968 onwards, and certainly Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Hélène Cixous, Louis Althusser among others). This relay seems to provide an easy linkage of postcolonialism and poststructuralism, via Bhabha's reference to, and reappropriation of, a number of Derrida's ‘key concepts’, such as différance. Thus Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, for example, in their Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, describe the ‘third space’ of Bhabha's ‘ambivalence’ as ‘something like the idea of deferral in poststructuralism’ (Ashscroft et al., 1998: 61).