Unsettling the Empire: Tayeb Salih and Jean Rhys Parody British Canonical Narratives from A Post-Colonial Lens

Rewriting European literary texts from a postcolonial perspective is a provocative strategy that exposes and parodies the binary opposition between colonizer and colonized. Through reimagining, subverting, or undermining canonical works, post-colonial writers foreground the histories and identities of the marginalized, while confronting the lingering effects of colonial discourse. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Homi Bhabha and Bill Ashcroft, I investigate how Jean Rhys and Tayeb Salih write from a space of cultural hybridity-a "third space" as Homi Bhabha (1994) conceptualizes-where colonial legacies are negotiated rather than simply rejected. Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) reclaims the silenced voice of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), recentering the narrative through a feminist and Caribbean lens. Similarly, Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966) counters Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), dismantling its portrayal of Africa as a dehumanized and static "other." Both writers engage in what Ashcroft et al. (1989) describe as "counter-discourse," reshaping the colonial canon from within by revealing its internal contradictions. Rhys and Salih assert narrative authority through intertextuality, complicating the colonizer/colonized dialectic without entirely rejecting the Western literary tradition. Their works do more than resist; they reconfigure dominant narratives, making visible the hybrid identities, suppressed histories, and cultural ambiguities that European literature often effaces. In doing so, they challenge the authority of the canon and make space for alternative modes of representation grounded in post-colonial experience.