The revaluation of hybridity in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article uses Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity to study Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North. For Bhabha, hybridity is a condition born out of cultural difference; it defies notions of origin, possibilities of transcendence, and all shapes of cultural and subjective entity. In Season of Migration to the North, hybridity of this kind is reflected in both the character of Mustafa Sa’eed and in the novel’s form, which largely represents the narrator’s complex and self-reflexive “readerly” experience of Sa’eed’s life. In view of the novel’s formal hybridity, the article argues, extrapolating from Bhabha’s theory, that the concept of hybridity – the process of culture-formation – also throws light on practices of self-reflection and the ways in which subjective and cultural meanings are continually being altered and revised. As such, the narrator’s recuperation of agency in the novel is a direct outcome of his experience of hybridity.