Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Intertextuality and Intercultural References in Literary Texts: Unraveling the Tapestry of Global Literature
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

Weaving the World Together With a Fraying Thread: Intertextuality, Intercultural Vibes, and Why Global Lit Feels Like an Emotional Conspiracy

Some books feel like they’re winking at you. Others are straight-up whispering in the language of ghosts—authors long dead, or just somewhere else entirely, writing about rain and grief and desire in a dialect you’ve never spoken but somehow already understand. That’s not magic. That’s intertextuality. Or, okay, maybe it is magic—but the literary kind. The kind that doesn’t involve Hogwarts but instead the slow, hot burn of meaning bleeding through borders and centuries like ink in wet paper.

We talk a lot (too much?) about “global literature” like it’s a genre: shelf-ready, translated, blurbed by someone who once taught post-colonial studies. But honestly, the thing that actually makes literature global isn’t setting or accent or even the visa status of the author. It’s the cross-cultural whisper network between texts. The sideways glances. The déjà vu. The way a Nigerian novel carries a Russian echo. Or how a queer poet in South Korea might answer back to Sappho, not with a translation, but with a gesture, a posture. A little tilt of the head. You know, literature flirting with its own archive.

The Web Isn’t Flat—It’s Textured

People love the idea of a “literary tapestry” because it sounds cozy. Like literature is one giant quilt. You can trace a thread from Homer to Morrison to Marquez to Murakami like it’s a curated Spotify playlist. But it’s not that neat. It's less tapestry, more conspiracy board. Red string. Thumbtacks. A scribbled note in the margin of a book you forgot you owned.

Take Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. On the surface, it’s this Sudanese novel about post-colonial whiplash. But read it again (then again, angry this time) and suddenly you see Heart of Darkness bleeding through the pages. Salih isn’t just referencing Conrad—he’s dragging him, dueling him, dismantling him in real time. It’s like literary sub-tweeting before Twitter even existed. And the best part? You don’t need to be fluent in Conrad to feel it. That tension. That inverted gaze. The way the story turns around and stares back at empire, dead in the eyes.

This is what intertextuality actually does: it resurrects. It revives. It insists that nothing is ever really over, least of all a narrative.

Messy Dialogues Across Borders

It’s not just colonial hangovers, either. Sometimes it’s joy. Sometimes it’s gossip. Sometimes the intertext is a kind of hunger—for recognition, for kin. You get that in Han Kang’s The White Book, a minimalist meditation on loss that’s basically a whisper to Paul Auster and Marguerite Duras if they both lived in Seoul and cried only in grayscale. Or look at Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—which isn’t just a novel, it’s a mixtape: of Baldwin, of Vietnamese folk poetry, of 2000s New England trauma, of Lana Del Rey mood boards. Vuong doesn’t care if the references land; they pulse. They hover. They’re not citations—they’re hauntings.

That’s the thing: intertextuality in global literature doesn’t always feel like a literary salon. It often feels like possession. You’re not citing another author—you’re being inhabited. Some of the most thrilling books in translation aren’t interested in assimilation at all. They want resonance. They want revenge. They want to get under your skin and make you hear the stories you didn’t even know you were raised by.

Who Gets to Be Global? (Spoiler: Not Just the British Council Picks)

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. “Global literature” tends to be a label slapped on non-Western books that have been conveniently de-fanged, translated just enough, and packaged with a melancholy cover featuring a bird or a boat. That’s not intertextuality—that’s a marketing strategy. And it flattens everything.

But when the authors themselves reach across boundaries, it’s rarely polite. It’s charged. Jhumpa Lahiri writing in Italian about translation isn’t a flex—it’s a dismantling of literary identity itself. It’s a refusal. And what happens when Borges gets name-checked in an Argentinian horror comic, or Clarice Lispector’s weird aphorisms end up embedded in a Nigerian poet’s Instagram captions? That’s not academic dialogue. That’s aesthetic smuggling. That’s transcontinental fanfiction at a cosmic level.

Let’s be real—books talk to each other the way people do: awkwardly, emotionally, and with a thousand years of backstory. They flirt, they fight, they echo. And sometimes the best cross-cultural references aren’t “references” at all. They’re moods. They’re inherited wounds. They’re the literary equivalent of having your mom’s accent slip out when you’re mad.

The Algorithm Can’t Follow This

There’s something wild and deeply un-streamlined about real intertextuality. It doesn’t work like a TikTok trend or a Goodreads listicle. It’s allergic to algorithms. This isn’t “if you liked X, you’ll love Y.” It’s: “If you once read a line of Rumi on a train when you were seventeen, you’ll feel this weird ache while reading a Chilean novella in your thirties, and you won’t know why, but it’ll be holy.” That.

And look, sometimes it’s a mess. You read a Japanese sci-fi novel that’s clearly obsessed with Kafka and try to keep up, but it’s like decoding a dream someone else had in a language you don’t speak. That’s fine. That’s part of it. The literary global landscape is not meant to be convenient. It’s not supposed to be digestible. Some references are meant to go over your head like airplanes full of other people's gods.

Reading as Trespassing

To read globally is to trespass. To read intertextually is to walk into someone else’s memory and start rearranging the furniture. And yet, somehow, you feel welcome. Like the story was waiting for you to find the secret latch and push it open.

Think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a novel that boldly rewires Antigone through the lens of Muslim identity in a post-9/11 Britain. That’s not just clever literary homage. That’s a freaking confrontation. The Greeks thought they invented tragedy? Here, try being brown and radicalized by your own country’s surveillance complex. Now that’s catharsis.

Or look at Marlon James, who basically said “What if Tolkien, but Jamaican history, but also queer mythic sex, but also no apologies?” in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. The result is gloriously disorienting. And deeply intertextual in the most chaotic way. Not academic, but ancestral. Not colonial, but cosmic.

The Power of Being Misunderstood

Here’s where things get complicated (and I kind of love that): not all intertextuality is made for you. Some references aren’t just opaque—they’re exclusionary. Coded. Intimate in a way you’ll never crack. And that’s okay.

Literature doesn’t owe you legibility.

The moment we start expecting every global text to perform its references for us—footnoted, translated, culturally smoothed over—we’re back in empire mode. The real joy is in the not-knowing. The static. The sense that something bigger is happening beneath the sentence.

So maybe you read a line and you know it’s a callback—but to what, exactly? A proverb? A banned poem? A centuries-old blood feud preserved through verse? Who cares. Let it haunt. Let it hover. Literature is allowed to keep secrets. Especially from you.

So What Now?

Look, I’m not here to tell you to go read more translated fiction out of guilt. That’s missionary talk. I’m saying: be curious. Be willing to be lost. Follow the echoes. Let one book lead you to another, not because some syllabus says so, but because the sentence tingled, and you want to chase that feeling like a heat signature.

Read Ferrante and then Ann Goldstein’s translation of Ferrante and then whatever Goldstein touched next. Read Ben Lerner and then César Vallejo, sideways, slanted. Read Audre Lorde and then find the poets she raised by accident. Read until you feel like your brain is speaking five dialects of metaphor. Read until you’re dizzy. Until you stop trying to figure out where one culture ends and another begins. Spoiler: they don’t.

This is what global literature actually is—not geography, not genre, but osmosis. Literature soaking through the membrane of time, culture, and genre. Leaving stains. Making shapes. Rewriting itself in the margins.

You don’t need a passport. Just a pulse.