Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugene 2025

Literary Responses to Globalization and Cultural Exchange: Embracing the World's Voices
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

I remember the first time I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I was 22, curled up in a shitty apartment, and that book hit me like a monsoon. Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of India’s independence, his life tangled up with a nation’s chaos—it was overwhelming, sprawling, magical. But what got me wasn’t just the story; it was how Rushdie was clearly riffing on everything from Indian oral traditions to Dickens to Bollywood. It’s like he took the whole world and stuffed it into one book. Compare that to Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. That novel’s Japan is quiet, surreal, with talking cats and fish falling from the sky, but it’s also soaked in American pop culture—jazz, Johnny Walker, Colonel Sanders. Both books are products of globalization, slurping up influences from everywhere, yet they’re so rooted in their own soil. It’s like they’re shouting, “I’m from here, but I’m also from everywhere!” and I’m just sitting there, nodding, a little dizzy.

Globalization in literature isn’t some neat exchange program where cultures swap polite postcards. It’s more like a crowded marketplace where everyone’s yelling, bartering, stealing, flirting. Take Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. The way he writes about migration—magical doors that whisk refugees from war-torn places to London or California—it’s not just a story, it’s a gut-punch. You feel the dislocation, the way global movement fractures identity. Now, put that next to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Her Kerala is so specific, with its monsoon-soaked rivers and caste rules, but it’s also haunted by global forces—British colonialism, Western ideals creeping in like damp rot. Both books are wrestling with what happens when the world’s currents sweep through your life. Hamid’s doors are literal; Roy’s are metaphorical. Either way, they’re messy portals to somewhere else.

Here’s where I get a bit annoyed. People talk about globalization like it’s all McDonald’s and iPhones, flattening everything into one big, boring monoculture. But literature? It’s doing the opposite. It’s taking that global flow and making it jagged, human, specific. I read Teju Cole’s Open City a few years back, and it was like walking through New York with Julius, this Nigerian-American guy who’s half in, half out of every world he touches. The city’s a global hub—art, music, immigrants—but Julius’s thoughts are restless, pulling in Brussels, Lagos, history, jazz. It’s a book that feels like globalization itself: chaotic, connected, lonely. Compare that to Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. That novel’s Turkey is a battleground of East and West—secularism, Islam, snowstorms, poetry. Both Cole and Pamuk are writing from opposite corners, but they’re both grappling with how global forces make you question who you are. It’s not flattening; it’s fracturing, in the best way.

Okay, confession time: I’m kind of a sucker for how globalization lets writers play with form. Like, take Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. It’s not just a novel; it’s got blog posts woven into it, Ifemelu’s sharp takes on race in America. It feels like the internet age, where global voices aren’t just in books—they’re on X, in comments sections, going viral. I read it on a bus, laughing out loud at her observations, then feeling like I’d been slapped when she got real about immigration’s toll. Now, compare that to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. That book is a Russian nesting doll of stories—19th-century Pacific, 1970s California, dystopian Korea, all linked by this cosmic thread. It’s globalization as a time machine, showing how stories echo across borders and centuries. Adichie’s grounded, Mitchell’s cosmic, but both are saying: the world’s too big to stay in one place.

Something that bugs me is how we pretend globalization is new. Like, hello, the Silk Road was a thing! Literature’s been global forever—just look at The Thousand and One Nights. Those stories were bouncing between Persia, India, Arabia, way before anyone had a passport. Scheherazade’s tales are a mash-up of cultures, full of genies and sailors and far-off lands. Fast-forward to today, and you’ve got someone like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. It’s Vietnam, America, communism, capitalism, all tangled up in a spy’s head. Reading it felt like being double-crossed by my own brain—every page flips your perspective. Put that next to, say, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Yeah, Conrad’s got issues (colonial gaze, anyone?), but his Congo is already a global crossroads—European greed, African resistance, rivers carrying it all. Both books show how globalization isn’t just trade or tech—it’s power, betrayal, and stories crossing lines.

Let’s talk about the internet, because it’s turned this whole thing into a circus. Globalization used to mean ships and caravans; now it’s X threads and TikTok stitches. I was scrolling the other day and saw people arguing about whether Squid Game’s critique of capitalism loses its Korean edge when it’s dubbed for Netflix’s global audience. That’s literature now—TV, memes, fanfiction, all of it. It’s not just scholars comparing The Odyssey to Moby-Dick anymore; it’s randos on Reddit debating whether Beowulf’s monster-slaying vibes match Demon Slayer’s anime intensity. And you know what? That chaos is beautiful. It’s cultural exchange on steroids, messy and loud and full of bad takes, but it’s real.

I’m gonna get a little personal here. Reading globally has messed with me in the best way. I picked up Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend during a rough patch, and Naples felt so far from my life, yet Lila and Lenù’s friendship was like a mirror to my own. That raw, Italian specificity—poverty, patriarchy, the 1950s—somehow felt universal. Then I read Ismail Kadare’s The Siege, about an Ottoman attack on an Albanian fortress. It’s so rooted in Balkan history, yet the paranoia, the defiance—it hit me like something out of my own world. Globalization lets these stories find each other, and me, in ways that make my head spin. It’s not just about “diverse voices”; it’s about how those voices make you see yourself differently.

Here’s where I get a bit cranky: globalization in literature can be a double-edged sword. It’s amazing that I can read a novel from Nigeria or Japan in my local bookstore, but who decides what gets translated? Big publishers often pick what’s “marketable,” which usually means what fits Western tastes. That’s why you get watered-down versions of Rumi or Murakami sometimes, stripped of their weird edges. But then you’ve got writers like Scholastique Mukasonga, whose Our Lady of the Nile brings Rwanda’s scars to life without pandering. Compare that to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s a global classic, but its magic realism was once “exotic” to Western readers, a label that cheapens its Colombian heart. The global literary market can amplify voices, but it can also flatten them. It’s a tightrope.

I’m not gonna wrap this up neatly, because life’s not neat, and neither is literature. Globalization’s made the world’s stories a giant, noisy party—some voices drown out others, some crash the gate. Reading No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai next to Toni Morrison’s Beloved feels like time-traveling through pain and resilience, Japan to America, human to human. Literature doesn’t just respond to globalization; it’s the map, the compass, the shipwreck. So, grab a book from somewhere far away. Let it shake you up. That’s where the world’s voices live—loud, messy, and worth hearing.