Hoegberg, David2018-11-022018-11-022018Hoegberg, D. (2018). Building new selves: identity, “Passing,” and intertextuality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light. Safundi, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2018.1453977https://hdl.handle.net/1805/17694This article examines Zoë Wicomb’s wide-ranging use of intertextuality in the novel Playing in the Light to explore the links between identity construction and postcolonial authorship. Focusing on the characters as intertextual agents, I argue that the three coloured women on whom the novel focuses – Helen, Marion, and Brenda – use texts in distinctive ways that illuminate their struggles to position themselves in South Africa’s complex and changing racial landscape. Racial “passing” is one form of a larger pattern in the novel of the use of citation and imitation to achieve specific ends. By embedding the citations of Helen and Marion within the citation-rich narrative of Brenda, Wicomb lays bare the mechanisms of identity construction within a work that stages and highlights its own intertextual practices.enPublisher PolicyZoë WicombPlaying in the LightintertextualityArticle