Intertextuality In Research

“When the Philippine Islands became a U.S. colony at the turn of the century, its inhabitants succeeded the Africans, Mexicans, and American Indians as the “White Man’s Burden,” the object of “domestic racial imperialism” carried out through brutal pacification and cooptative patronage.”

“These multigenerational households were the norm for many Filipinos. Even when their immediate family had the means to live on their own, most said their parents felt a sense of obligation to help new relatives get on their feet, especially if they themselves had been beneficiaries of such familial generosity.”

“Filipino moms predetermine what their kids are supposed to be when they grow up…There’s a lot of Filipinos in here right now that are nurses…I’m

Intertextuality-where one text makes explicit or implicit reference to other texts or textual systems—does not necessarily entail a rewriting project. While all counter-discourse is intertextual, not all intertextuality is counter-discursive. By definition, counterdiscourse actively works to destabilise the power structures of the originary text rather than simply to acknowledge its influence. Such discourse tends to target imposed canonical traditions rather than pre-existing master narratives which ‘belong’ to the colonised culture. Hence, when Vijay Mishra comments that ‘we may indeed claim that all Indian literary, filmic and theatrical texts endlessly rewrite The Mahabharata’ (1991:195), he is using ‘rewriting’ less as a marker of counter-discourse than of intertextuality: all other narratives in India have as context and influence The Mahabharata but the master text itself is not particularly targeted for strategic reform. A specific example of this kind of rewriting occurs in Stella Kon’s The Bridge (1980) which is self-consciously shaped by another influential Indian epic, The Ramayana. Kon’s Singaporean drama, with its additional intertextual references to Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade, uses The Ramayana as a play-within-a-play for the patients of a Help Service Centre who are trying to overcome drug dependence. Kon maintains the traditional (pre-contact) structures of the epic, dramatising it as part

Two examples of contemporary versions of Euripides’ The Bacchae include Mr. O’Dwyer’s Dancing Party (1968) by the New Zealand poet and playwright, James K.Baxter, and A Refined Look at Existence (1966) by the Australian, Rodney Milgate. Both these plays localise the temporal and spatial setting of Euripides’ drama, but their updating of the plot overshadows any attempt to decentre imperial hegemonies; rather, these two texts merely make the British Empire more accessible to the former colonies in the twentieth century. Although Milgate casts Pentheus as an Aborigine, he misses a significant opportunity to use him to centralise the issue of race relations in Australian society of the 1960s. Instead, the portrayal of ‘Penthouse’, the Aboriginal Pentheus, becomes racist, and ‘Donny’s’ (Dionysus’) attempts to seek revenge on his family reveal a protagonist even more self-absorbed than Euripides’ original. Similarly, Baxter’s play, which focuses on boredom in a number of 1960s marriages in Remuera, New Zealand, is not a strategic postcolonial reworking of a canonical text but merely a somewhat misogynist updating. As contemporary versions of a Greek play with Australian and New Zealand reference points, A Refined Look at Existence and Mr. O’Dwyer’s Dancing Party are only moderately successful, and certainly dated.

Filipino-Americans make up the second-largest strand