How Soon Is Now? Intertextuality and Reading in the Postcolonial Present

Abstract

This article discusses the merits of reading postcolonial literature within an intertextual framework. Essential to the argument is the point that understanding intertextuality as a mere "study of sources," a task of tracing references and expostulating on their meaning, does not embrace the more productive and liberatory ends of a more theoretically informed practice of intertextual reading. Indebted largely to the work of Kristeva, Bakhtin and Bhabha, this discussion attempts to chart the different ways in which critics and theorists have appropriated this term and then argues for a (re)deployment of this critical framework to best retain the semantic openendedness of the present--the time and place of postcolonial critique.