Cultural Residency, Incompatibility and Resistance: A Comparative Reading of Season of Migration to The North and Cockroach

Abstract

Culture in postcolonial studies has conceptually imbedded itself in both society and politics, especially in literary productions and criticisms. Homi Bhabha locates culture in a centerless position entangled in hybridity. On the broader level of understanding culture, Bhabha shows that differences between geographically separated cultures do not signify that a pure singular culture exits; rather, throughout history cultures have mingled through trade and migration and are consequently hybrid and always have been. Nonetheless, to study cultural difference, Bhabha proposes that cultures need to be looked at from the border lines. Peripheral borderline differences of cultures are where residual culture and residency can be depicted concerning a subject. As Bhabha looks at culture ubiquitously, Raymond Williams looks at culture in specificity, he discourses residual culture as appertaining to a past culture’s role in a contemporary dominant cultural experience. I claim that cultural residency is apparent in literature that deals with migrancy. Transitioning from one culture to another has immense consequences on a subject and there are many variables that come into play when looking for the result of such effects, thusly, there cannot be an absolute culmination in such an analysis. However, understanding culture in transition within agent experience in literary works enables an analysis that illustrates the roles of dominant and past culture and the experiences that cultural residency brings. These experiences that develop from cultural residency create conflict and a dichotomy of resistance and opposition as I argue in my analysis of the main characters’ circumstances and experiences in Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and Cockroach by Rawi Hage. Based on my readings of these works in context, I illustrate that the complexities of cosmopolitanism, assimilation and repatriation, and identity are features that iterate resistance and a cultural dichotomy between East and West.