Tayeb Salih and Modernism’s Season of Migration to the South

Abstract

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1967) is understandably one of the best-known Arabic novels, and its English translation is probably the most widely read Arabic novel in English. This paper demonstrates that Season of Migration to the North is in many ways a classic postcolonial novel, concerned both with the British colonization of Sudan and with the postcolonial legacy of British rule. It also engages in direct dialog with British literature. For example, it has been frequently seen as a sort of rejoinder to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But Season of Migration to the North is a sophisticated literary work that has much in common with works of European modernism, even as it writes back to them. In fact, Salih’s novel has a particularly large number of points of contact with the work of James Joyce – perhaps the greatest of all European modernists but also a postcolonial writer in his own right.

Keywords

• Arabic literature
• Joseph Conrad
• James Joyce
• modernism
• postcolonial literature
• Tayeb Salih