Abstract
This essay examines spatial effects in Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, drawing on the work of eleventh-century theorist Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani and two twentieth-century theorists, Joseph Frank and Julia Kristeva. Attending to formal patterns that create a sense of synchronicity, repetition, or rupture, the essay shows how such effects serve to disrupt the representation of linear time, introduce intertextuality by quotation or allusion, and situate the novel’s setting, a small Sudanese village, in a global network of power. This reading uncovers shared ground between al-Jurjani’s theory of nazm, or construction, Frank’s concept of spatial form, and Kristeva’s “spatialization” of the word in the practice of intertextual reading and demonstrates the centrality of spatial concerns to the novel’s critical commentary on the experience of modernity.
