Homi Bhabha (in an essay in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies ^[1]) sees the connection clearly: “My growing conviction has been that the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within ‘colonial’ textuality, its governmental discourses and cultural practices, have enacted avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgment that have become current in contemporary theory – aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to ‘totalizing’ concepts, to name but a few.”

Deconstruction first takes shape not in Paris but in Algiers and Delhi.