Literary Form as Epistemological Resistance: Postcolonial Narrative Architecture in Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Roy’s The God of Small Things

This paper positions itself at the intersection of postcolonial literary studies and critical digital humanities, developing a theoretical framework for understanding how formally experimental postcolonial novels challenge dominant epistemological assumptions embedded in both colonial historiography and contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. Through close analysis of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), the paper demonstrates how these texts deploy formal strategies: nonlinear temporality, linguistic heterogeneity, narrative opacity, typographical experimentation, and generic resistance, that actively resist the standardization and categorical reduction characteristic of colonial knowledge production. Literary form itself constitutes epistemological critique. Drawing on postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, translation studies, library and information science, and critical digital humanities scholarship, I articulate three conceptual principles derived from these novels’ formal resistance: preserving opacity as epistemological right, accommodating temporal complexity, and honoring granular particularity. These formally experimental postcolonial novels offer more than representational content; their narrative architectures provide theoretical resources for reimagining knowledge organization beyond colonial and certain computational logics that currently dominate digital infrastructure design.