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

Literature and the Exploration of Cultural Stereotypes and Prejudices
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

“Whose Story Is It, Anyway?”: When Literature Plays With Cultural Stereotypes and Still Gets Under Your Skin

There’s this moment in American Dirt (yes, I’m going there) where a white American woman writes a migrant story and suddenly half of publishing is on fire. Not because of the prose—though, yeah, it’s mediocre at best—but because of the who behind the story. Not the characters. The author. The discourse ate itself alive trying to decide whether that mattered. It does. And it doesn’t. And that’s the whole beautiful, terrible point.

Literature has always flirted with stereotype—sometimes with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, sometimes with a kind of gaslighty finesse. And honestly, it’s exhausting. But also kind of amazing? Because books don’t just reflect cultural prejudice; they absorb it, mutate it, regurgitate it in shiny new packages. And if you’re paying attention—if you read the wrong book at the right time—it can make you question your entire framework for understanding other people. Or yourself. Or both.

Let’s talk about exoticism, for instance. That weird aesthetic fetish where “the Other” becomes a decorative flourish, like jasmine-scented paper or a vaguely sad-eyed woman in a sari who says something spiritual before being hit by a bus. I mean—hello, Eat, Pray, Love. But this isn't just about travel-lit fantasy. It’s buried in supposedly serious literature too, the kind that wins prizes. That gets taught. That people underline and say changed their lives.

Take Memoirs of a Geisha. Arthur Golden wrote a lyrical, elegant, completely Western male-gazey version of Japanese womanhood, full of grace and tragedy and kimono rustle. It’s literary opium—seductive and slow-burning and ultimately kind of empty once the high wears off. You’re left with this glazed version of a culture filtered through someone who was just so enchanted by the silk and the rituals and the sad girls with perfect posture. Which is not to say it didn’t move people. Or that it shouldn’t exist. Just that it’s not a mirror—it’s a snow globe. Shake it, and you get a perfectly contained blizzard of clichés.

Now—contrast that with something like Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. That book doesn’t exoticize. It doesn’t stylize pain. It just quietly devastates. It’s about Koreans in Japan, stuck in generational loops of being looked down on, misnamed, mistrusted. You finish it, and there’s no aesthetic residue—just a tight ache in your chest and a suspicion that you’ve been complicit in not knowing this history. That’s the difference. One book wants you to admire the petals; the other forces you to notice the rot in the soil.

Here’s the messy part, though: some stereotypes work. Not in the sense of being “true,” but in the sense of being emotionally or narratively effective. They scratch some ancient nerve. The tight-lipped immigrant dad. The fiery Latina. The mystical old Black woman who delivers plot wisdom like she’s reading from a magical Yelp review. These types show up because they do something. They carry emotional shorthand. And sometimes writers use them because they think they have to. Because publishing still wants recognizable “diversity.” Like, oh wow, a queer Muslim teen with a skateboard and generational trauma? That’s so fresh. Until it’s not.

But what if the stereotype is... you?

This is where reading gets personal, and uncomfortable, and sometimes kind of spiritual. Like, I remember reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith in college and just spiraling. Because there was this Jamaican guy with this whole vibe—funny, loud, low-key tragic—and I saw my uncle in him. But also, I hated that I saw my uncle in him. I didn’t want us to be characters. I wanted us to be complex. Unreadable. Not written. And yet... Zadie got it. She mocked the stereotype and lived inside it at the same time, which is basically what all of us do at Thanksgiving dinner, anyway.

There’s something almost quantum about that: being a stereotype and a human being at once. That dual state, that identity slippage, is what great literature can reveal—not just the architecture of a prejudice, but how deeply people inhabit it. The Buddha of Suburbia does this brilliantly. Hanif Kureishi takes the trope of the “exotic dad” and just roasts him alive—while also making him weirdly lovable and sad and horny and wise. You laugh. You wince. You recognize. You recoil. Then you do it again.

But the real gold is when a book makes the reader—the privileged, unconscious, unquestioning reader—the object of the stereotype.

Heart of Darkness, problematic king that it is, kind of does this. It exposes how much Western readers want Africa to be a symbol. A plot device. An inkblot. You get the sense Conrad knew exactly how much the reader was leaning into the exotic horror and decided to weaponize it. Same with Things Fall Apart, but from the other side—Achebe showing how colonizers flatten culture and myth and grief into digestible moral fables. The white readers nod and say, “So tragic,” and then go back to drinking oat milk lattes. Sorry. That was petty. But not untrue.

Then there’s the revenge arc. The books that take the stereotype, dress it up, then set it on fire. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi does this with such elegance you almost miss how brutal it is. Two lineages—one in Africa, one in America—each generation hauling the weight of what others assume about them. Slavery, addiction, incarceration, assimilation. It’s not a melodrama. It’s just history, gently told, with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. And because it doesn’t scream, it cuts deeper.

But sometimes a book screams and that’s the whole point.

Like Native Son. That novel is one long scream. Bigger Thomas is not likeable. Not redeemable. And that’s exactly why Richard Wright gave him to us—because white readers expected the “good Negro,” and instead got a complicated, violent, cornered animal of a man. He’s a walking stereotype, and that’s the horror. He knows what people see when they look at him—and eventually, he becomes it. It’s not a story of redemption. It’s a dare. A provocation. A middle finger in novel form.

The books that sit the longest with me are the ones that don’t try to fix the stereotype—they just expose its power. They know we all walk around with inherited scripts in our heads. They don’t try to write around them. They write into them. They say, “Yes, that’s what you think. Now stay here with it. Don’t flinch.”

And what about humor? Comedy is probably the sharpest scalpel for stereotype. Think of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Díaz doesn’t just call out Dominican machismo and nerd shame—he turns them into theater, into language games, into this messy, polyphonic symphony of cultural contradiction. And the footnotes? That’s where he traps you. You think you're in on the joke, but you're being schooled the whole time.

Still, there’s a fine line between critique and performance. Between using the stereotype and becoming it. I worry sometimes that lit about trauma—especially marginalized trauma—has to perform pain in a very specific, publishable way. That there’s a mold. That if your story doesn’t align with what a certain audience expects oppression to look like, it doesn’t “resonate.” The stereotype isn’t always a character. Sometimes it’s a structure. A voice. A market constraint.

So where does that leave us?

Not with answers. Definitely not with moral clarity. But maybe with better questions. Like: when is a stereotype a weapon, and when is it a crutch? Who gets to narrate whom? And when a book “represents” a culture, what does it owe that culture—if anything?

We like to pretend literature is above this. That fiction is a sacred, neutral space. It’s not. It never was. Stories are where cultures argue about themselves. Where prejudice gets polished into metaphor and sold back to us as enlightenment. And that’s okay. That’s the work. Reading is a form of vulnerability. So is writing. So is realizing that the character you mocked in chapter one is your mother. Or your neighbor. Or you.

I don’t think literature can dismantle stereotypes entirely. But I think it can do something sneakier: it can make them unstable. Ambiguous. Too slippery to hold. And maybe that’s better than purity or correctness. Maybe that’s the kind of mess we need. A book that doesn’t just tell you what’s true—but makes you live inside the question.

And then leaves you there.