“In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Crossreading strategies in global literatures

Abstract

This essay explores ‘crossreading’ in global literatures—reading texts across Western, Eurocentric cultural boundaries and horizons—an act that requires crossing into alternative epistemological orientations and discursive strategies. Focusing on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Keri Hulme's the bone people, I discuss the re‐orientation and re‐conceptualization of cultural beliefs and assumptions that Western readers need to make in order to understand global literatures. As novels that convey in written form the traditional material and stories of oral culture, they articulate world‐views and discursive strategies that differ radically from Western ones. I argue that through a reading process that involves “listening” to the cultural and epistemological contexts of the novels, readers can indeed accomplish those acts of crossreading. Such strategies are all the more necessary in today's increasingly transnational world.