Manifestations of Cultural Identity in Narrative Discourse: A case Study of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

This research aims to explore the manifestations of cultural identity in narrative discourse through a pragmatic approach, based on the premise that cultural identity constitutes one of the fundamental components in the construction of literary discourse, and that pragmatics, as a modern linguistic approach, is capable of uncovering both the explicit and implicit meanings embedded in texts. The research examines the concepts of identity and culture, clarifies the relationship between them, and introduces pragmatics along with its principal analytical mechanisms, namely context, speech acts, and conversational implicature, highlighting their role in the analysis of narrative discourse. The research adopts a descriptive-analytical method and takes Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih as its primary corpus in order to identify the major manifestations of cultural identity in the novelistic discourse. It analyzes a number of textual examples that reflect spatial, social, linguistic, and civilizational identities, as well as Arab-African identity and the related issues of belonging and interaction with the Other. The findings reveal that the narrative discourse of the novel embodies multiple cultural dimensions. The pragmatic approach proved effective in uncovering the communicative and cultural functions performed by language within the text. Furthermore, the research demonstrates that cultural identity in the novel is not a fixed construct; rather, it is a dynamic formation shaped through the interaction of place, language, history, memory, and culture