ABSTRACT
Citation means borrowing, appropriating, displacing, and relocating parts of an original. To make this clear from the start, citation permeates all fields of social and cultural practice. It can be part of the art world, the industry, the economy, and academia. While the practice of citation is an act of copying, it does not necessarily produce a copy. What it frequently creates is a new field of meaning by means of connotation, allusion, and reference. Citation in my argumentation is defined as cultural practice that represents appropriation but leads to something new in a different context. With a nod to Walter Benjamin, Rüdiger Kunow points out that citing a text means interrupting a context. This reveals a certain unruly and challenging aspect of the practice of citation. In postcolonial and decolonial criticism, in particular, the act of citing bears reference to the inside of a culture and a new context outside its constituents. In the words of Kunow, “citation is both located and movable, sedentary and open to employments at other sites” (252). As he continues to explain, “citation constitutes a double move: to the inside, to core constituents of a given culture, and to an outside, to a new context” (252).
