Sweep Me off My Feet: Cultural Dislocation and Self Disformation, a Postcolonial Reading of Romantic Love
Chingling Wo

Abstract
This article reads Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) to unveil Romantic love’s structural affiliation with colonial capitalism. Suggesting that Romantic love is more than an ideology or a discourse, the article argues that Romantic love is commodity fetishism. As commodity fetishism, love is the part of the system that stands for the whole; within the dynamics of Romantic love, one can observe the operation of capitalism in the material formations that gives rise to the spirituality of the modern desiring subject. The genesis of a desiring subject capable of experiencing Romantic love often coincides with systematic disruption of the subalterns’ traditional culture and the loss of collective purposes. The essay adds to the debate on how romantic love participates in colonial conquest by connecting commodity fetishism to the many levels of destruction and dislocation involved when Romantic love creeps into the human heart.

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