Narratives of Global Capital and the Spirits of Anti-colonial Resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I consider how the inheritances of secular modernity condition and constrain forms of cosmopolitan and Marxist critique. I analyse Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) as a text which theorises anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance by materialising spiritual resurgence. Almanac blurs the boundaries between materiality and spirituality and reveals the limits of the language of globalisation for reading the text's anti-colonial gesture. I argue that Silko contests frameworks of secular modernity in two central ways: first, by disrupting accounts of linear time, and second by de-centring the role of human agency in revolution. Drawing on original archival research from the Leslie Marmon Silko Papers, I show how Almanac is a genre-defying text in active conversation with late Cold War imperialist conflicts in South America and Marxist theories of revolution. The political force of Silko's novel, however, lies not only in its representation of late capital in the settler colonial nation-state, but in its capacity to imagine other worlds beyond the strictures of colonial modernity. Challenging conceptions of the autonomous subject of agency, and disrupting the progressive temporality of resistance movements, Silko's novel proposes new critical imaginaries for thinking dissent in communion with the sacred.

KEYWORDS:

• Leslie Marmon Silko
• literature
• sacred
• secular modernity
• Marxism
• globalisation

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Christopher Lee and Renisa Mawani for the opportunity to contribute to this special issue and to my anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. Many thanks to the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for their assistance in navigating Silko's archival papers. Finally, I am immeasurably grateful to Anne Stewart and Madeleine Reddon for their feedback on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sheila Giffen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is the recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and her doctoral research considers evocations of the sacred in literary responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the U.S. and South Africa.

Notes

1 Walter Mignolo's work on the ‘colonial matrix of power’ draws on Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano's articulation of the link between coloniality and European narratives of the modern world (Mignolo 2007: 476).

2 Excerpts from Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library by Leslie Marmon Silko. Copyright © 2019 by Leslie Marmon Silko, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

3 My argument sits alongside and also remains distinct from work by anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) and Marisol de la Cadena (2010), who convey the ontological agency of non-human, and other-than-human beings within Indigenous activism and politics. Marisol de la Cadena analyses social movements in Ecuador and Bolivia to show how the ontological agency of ‘earth-beings’ in environmental protest reconfigures the bounds of politics and challenges the presumed separation between humans and nature (2010: 336). Rather than engage an ontological critique of human and non-human/other-than-human worlds, my own argument traces Silko's continued preoccupation with the ‘sacred’ to analyse forms of anti-colonial resistance concerned with materialising spirit work and the work of spirits.

4 Another important historical context for reading Silko's novel is the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). For an in-depth discussion of NAFTA, Indigenous politics, and the spatiality of borders, see Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations.

5 Following the success of her 1979 novel, Storyteller, Silko won a 1981 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship which gave her the time and resources to work on her next novel. Reflecting on her intensive research and writing process for Almanac, Silko says: ‘I never thought the novel would take ten years to write’ (1996: 144).

6 Among the conflicts and controversies that Silko tracked were: the actions of the ‘Sendero Luminoso’ or ‘Shining Path’ communist party in Peru; the ‘Iran-Contra affair’ and US support of the Contra Rebels who opposed the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua; and materials on the Guatemala Civil War (LMSP n.d.).

7 Silko scribbles this remark, along with notes for plot-line and character development above an article published in the New York Times on March 8, 1988: Peter Passelt, ‘Economic Scene: Faulty US Logic in Cocaine Policy’ (LMSP n.d.).

8 In an interview with Ellen L. Arnold from 1998, Silko refers to Almanac as her ‘tribute to Marx’ (Arnold 2000: 193), and as a ‘post-Marxist novel’ (Arnold 2000: 180). She goes on to elaborate how ‘capitalism is so much in the forefront of the destruction of community and people and the fabric of being, and always was’ (Arnold 2000: 181).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the University of British Columbia and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.