ABSTRACT
This discusses the painterly, iconic, and magical intertexts whose idioms create a pictured story world in Amruta Patil's graphic novel Kari primarily to think about the notion of postmodern intertextuality in relation to feminist identity politics. Often speaking from fantastic and uncommon textual places, the narrative voice presents a performative self-image that emphasizes how subjectivity is constituted within and via language. Kari, in this sense, shifts the focus from the story of its protagonist to the texts she writes or inhabits and thus replaces 'the very notion of modern consciousness with that of postmodern difference, the illusory status of identity that is constantly deferred in relation to that which is not itself'. However, motivated language structures (dis)assemble gendered subjectivity, there remains the difficult project of political reconstruction, of finding a voice that expresses prohibited desires and excluded stories within such processes. Postmodern retelling in these several forms has also been theorized, in relation to the politics of power and resistance.
