Dear Listeners

NATALIE PORTMAN as ANNE BOLEYN

This academic (who wrote a book examining Turkish, Bengali and Mexican Literatures) says that when he taught a World Literature course in a university in USA, he purposefully made the students read works in which there weren’t any Western or white characters to cling onto.

There's always going to be some horrible outliers, of course, but content produced out of China, Japan, and Korea have garnered major interest for ages now—and there almost never a Western character in any of that.

Not to mention, the specificity of this occurring within the USA is particularly strange since Americans don't, in all honesty, relate with any greater ease to Western Europeans outright either? Like, I don't relate to Hürrem due to her being Slavic because...I'm not Slavic???

The cultures are simply too different.

And, speaking as an American that majored in Creative Writing and Literature, reading material from other cultures is literally required per that degree. One way or another, if you're pursuing Literature at a college academic level, you're going to be given a course that falls under World Literature in some way and people still find characters to relate to.

Marie Antoinette + Hints of falling in love with her husband Louis XVI