Bioregionalism in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North: a postcolonial study

Abstract

This paper focuses on Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. It combines postcolonialism and bioregionalism to provide a comprehensive analysis of the novel. This helps create a postcolonial sense of place that brings to light the changes in ecosystems during and after colonisation. It investigates the characters’ sense of place and the extent to which this leads to their having a stable identity or an unstable one. Nature plays a vital role in shaping the identity of the main characters in the novel; both are born and raised in villages yet have different attachments to their surroundings. It also explores the characters’ relationship with nature, land in particular, in a postcolonial bioregional context by analysing what is considered place-based and out-of-place behaviours. The paper analyses how colonisation has changed the bioregion of Sudan in addition to the cultural and natural crises that resulted from it. It indicates the people’s postcolonial acts of resistance to these changes.

Keywords

• Bioregionalism
• ecocriticism
• postcolonialism
• place-based and out-of-place behaviours
• Oliver Nyambi, University of the Free State, South Africa
• Literature