The Politics of Otherness and Hybridity in (Post)colonial Literature

(Post) colonial texts have been the object of an ever increasing flow of writings. This study is part of these writings. It is a comparative study that tackles two main issues that run through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. These issues, are Otherness and hybridity. In this, the study's aim is twin. It first looks at the patterns of representation deployed in the construction of the Otherness of Africans in Conrad's text. In this confluence, it also considers the ways Salih's text appropriates the parameters of essentialism to construct the Otherness of Europeans, hence function contrariwise to Conrad's text and subvert the established Western modes of thinking. Second, the study attempts to locate signs of hybridity in both texts of Conrad and Salih. The crux argument that is developed with regard to hybridity is that it -hybridity- challenges the concept of Otherness and constructs a 'third space' wherein identity is negotiated and the lines of demarcations between the self and other are obliterated. The study looks at the issues of Otherness and hybridity in Conrad and Salih's texts through the lens of postcolonial theory.