Essay on "Literature and Cross-Cultural Encounters"

Essay 8 pages (2972 words) Sources: 8

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Hamid manages to link the personal and the political in this narrative, and brings a fascinating perspective to the notion that cross-cultural experience is always subjective and slippery -- because there is no "omniscient" third person narrator, the reader is forced to evaluate Changez's explanations and justifications both in terms of their surface but also in terms of the narrator's denials, blind-spots, and controversial statements (such as his experience of 9/11, in which Changez confesses that "despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased" (Hamid 72).

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume, 1988. Print.

Hwang's Pulitzer-winning drama provides a perfect example of cross-cultural encounters and misunderstandings. Using Puccini's popular opera Madame Butterfly -- about an American sailor who purchases a Japanese Geisha, marries her, and abandons her (whereupon she commits suicide) -- as his conceptual template, Hwang dramatizes a true but unbelievable story about a French diplomat who is seduced by a Chinese "actress" who turns out to be a man in female clothing. Anyone reading the original newspaper story must have been struck by the Westerner being fooled for so long during the course of a sexual affair, but Hwang makes this implausibility into the centerpiece of his drama. Using ideas derived from Edward Said (see below), Hwang ironizes the tragic-romantic drama to explore underlying Western assumptions about the inherent "femininity" of "Oriental" cultures.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Print.

The cross-cultural encounters occasioned by colonialism have been well-documented in South America, Africa, and Asia, but Declan Kiberd's important and fascinating study reminds us that Ireland provides an example of the colonialist enterprise that exists just on the edge of continental Europe itself. Kiberd's subject in this book is the way in which Irish writers began to re-invent their own national self-definition after centuries of colonization by the English. As Kiberd memorably remarks, "if colonialism is a system, so also is resistance" and this resistance begins when the subaltern native writer began "reading those texts which misrepresented him" and "resolved to answer back" (Kiberd 13). The study attains a relevance beyond the Anglo-Irish interaction, as Kiberd demonstrates the way in which the Irish were described by the English using the same terms and concepts by which they described Native Americans, Africans, and the peoples of the Indian subcontinent -- which leads to some amazing events described in this book, such as the "large party of Indian Hindus in native dress who walked in the Saint Patrick's Day parades of New York" in 1920, as an expression of solidarity following the Amritsar Massacre (Kiberd 255).

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print.

Lowry's classic dystopian novel may seem an unusual work to consider under the subject of cross-cultural encounters, but in a very important sense Lowry is engaged in presenting an allegory of the way that all cultures operate. There is no cross-cultural conflict in the world of The Giver, because conflict has been eradicated in the society that is described. The protagonist Jonas -- who is to "receive" the memories of this culture from "the Giver" -- does not know of the existence of war until he inherits the cultural memory, and it becomes clear that whatever devastating cultural trauma did occur in the past is the reason for the peculiar social structure of the dystopia. The world outside the community depicted in Lowry's novel is merely known as "Elsewhere," which effectively reduces all cultural difference to willed ignorance.

Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.

Pagden's classic study approaches the invention of the discipline of anthropology as a result of the cross-cultural encounters begun when the Spanish began to colonize the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Pagden's chief subject here is the way that Europeans attempted to understand and describe the native inhabitants they encountered, so in some sense he is investigating the origins of racism, but also the origins of a disinterested, scientific, or academic approach to the subject of racial and cultural difference. As Pagden notes, "sixteenth-century Europe…had very little knowledge and still less understanding of the peoples beyond its borders" and thus "there were very few terms with which to classify men" ( Pagden 13). Pagden offers an in-depth analysis of certain key terms -- such as "barbarian" -- which recur in early Spanish accounts of Native American societies, and uses them to illuminate the way in which cross-cultural encounters began to develop a vocabulary in Europe. As a result, Pagden provides necessary reading for understanding the conceptual framework behind the idea of cross-cultural encounters in literature.

Rawson, Claude. "Indians and Irish: Montaigne, Swift, and the Cannibal Question." Modern Language Quarterly, 53:3 (1992): 299-363. Print.

Rawson's essay explores a fascinating theme in cross-cultural encounters, by examining the willingness of western cultures to engage in fantasies of transgressive behavior on the part of subaltern cultures. Focusing on the issue of cannibalism -- which, as Rawson notes, is something that is only ever imputed to other cultures as a technique of denigration, and is never held forth by a culture as its own approved activity -- Rawson demonstrates the way in which certain Western writers turned this trope around, and used it as a technique for criticizing the cultural attitudes of the west. The French Renaissance-era essayist Michel de Montaigne is examined through his famous essay "Of Cannibals," which suggests that the cannibal behavior of New World natives is actually more admirable than the violent internecine European religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Meanwhile satirist Jonathan Swift's blackly comic "Modest Proposal" is shown to be a satire not of the colonized Irish, frequently depicted by the English as savage cannibals, but of the English colonizers, described as "a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation" (Rawson 360). Rawson concludes by demonstrating the ways in which racist assumptions can be repackaged to make the opposite point, that "Europeans are more barbaric than the barbarians." (Rawson 363).

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print.

Orientalism, the legendary study by the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, arguably caused a revolution in thought, by exposing and analyzing the ways in which America and Europe approached "Oriental" cultures -- a term that, historically, was used equally to apply to the vastly different cultures of the Middle East, Arabia, India, China, and Japan. Said uses a structuralist and post-structuralist method of analysis, by which he demonstrates that the "West" was defined by itself through a set of patronizing and inaccurate contrasts with the "East," a system of thought he defines as "Orientalism." As Said demonstrates, "so impressive have the descriptive and textual successes of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient's cultural, political, and social history are considered mere responses to the West. The West is the actor, and the Orient is a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior." (Said 108-9). The continuing relevance of Said's work here cannot be understated. In particular, Said's analysis of the "gendering" of "Oriental" cultures -- in which the Orient is assumed to be the passive female counterpart to the West's active male -- is the intellectual origin of the revisionist assumptions that underlie later works of literature including M. Butterfly.

Trousdale, Rachel. Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print.

This recent and fascinating study approaches the question of cross-cultural encounters in literature via a theoretical framework followed by the close analysis of two English-language novelists of foreign ancestry -- the British-Pakistani novelist Salman Rushdie and the Russian emigre turned American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Trousdale offers a more optimistic and appealing account of the way that cross-cultural encounter in fiction can transcend the sorrows of post-colonial oppression, by examining the way in which "transnational fiction" can "create communities that replace national cultures" and "use the rhetoric and epistemology of nationalism to enlist readers and writers into a new kind of group identity" (Trousdale 2). Trousdale's thesis relies on the famous idea, posited by Benedict Anderson, of "imagined communities" -- the way in which cultural identity is "brought into existence only through a collective act of imagination" (Trousdale 11). Trousdale suggests that this "act of imagination" can be redemptive and optimistic, by examining the ways in which a writer like Rushdie -- perhaps most famous for the scandal of his novel about Islam, The Satanic Verses, which prompted… READ MORE

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