Formal imagination: encountering generic difference in "Season of migration to the North"

Abstract

Tayeb Salehs 1969 narrative, Season oj Migration to the North, is often categorized as a novel, a form that Mary Layoun considers a *colonizing genre”, and which is more familiar among Season's global readership than some oł its local, Sudanese narrative forms. Season, however, challenges the interpretive practices that rely on genre to inform the way we make meaning of texts. Mustafa and the narrator are the main characters of this tale that resists the logic of a singular protagonist. Mustafa wishes to construct "a system of economics based on love not figures” (Season 35), a mission that parallel's Saleh's narrative; both attempt to transform dominant modes of knowledge by introducing new perspectives from which to assess the Western forms that shape global discourses. Mustafas quote begs the question of whether we could still formally consider economics the same system if the conventions by which we assess it - traditionally, figures and statistics - were to change. Paying particular attention to Raymond Williamss conception of convention as that which is "in effect naturalized within...cultural tradition” (Marxism and Literature 174), I explore how and if generic forms transform in response to conventional change imposed from the outside — in the case of this text, globalization, empire, and migration. I investigate how desire is channeled in Season into socially recognized and codified forms of marriage in both of the narrative's settings - London and the city on the Nile. Both cultural traditions have marriage rituals in place before Mustafa disrupts the power dynamics that iniorm socially appropriate expression of desire through marriage. Focusing on the forms that desire and narrative take in Season reveals how the presence of difference within and between these traditional forms either changes the forms themselves, or gets reabsorbed by dominant structures of meaning-making. Exploring how social forms in the world of Season react to the revaluation of local conventions, I argue that Season's reworking oi genrenallows for an investigation of how globalization, and world literature in particular, challenges the formal categories we use to interpret literature, and how we must consider the way we value certain protocols of our own reading practices when confronting our desire to master both meanings and the modes through which we arrive at them.