Reconstructing Masculinity: Gender and Displacement in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which the Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih challenges the creation of masculinity in the backdrop of colonial and post-colonial displacement. The novel provides such critical outlook on the redefinition of the gender identities via the experience with the imperial power, migration and culture hybridity. Although the current body of work has focused on the ways in which Salih criticizes colonialism and orientalism, a little effort has been directed at how masculinity per se is destabilized, fragmented, and re-built throughout the narrative. This paper considers postcolonial and gender theories in relation to the protagonist Mustafa Sa’eed and the unnamed narrator who could be negotiating masculine identity between Sudan and Britain. By close reading and discourse analysis, the paper shows how masculinity is not produced as an essential but a contentious performance constructed through displacement, memory and power. Through the presentation of the results, it becomes apparent that Salih dismantles colonial binaries of East and West by ambivalence the male subjectivity in exile. The article will also be part of the larger discussion of gender in postcolonial literature by demonstrating how the text by Salih can help us learn more about masculinity as a hybrid and unstable construction.

Keywords: Masculinity, Displacement, Postcolonialism, Gender, Hybridity, Tayeb Salih