Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Decolonization and Democracy in Leslie Marmon Silko’sGardens in the Dunes

Abstract

AbstractOver the course of the 1990s, the reception of Almanac of The Dead’s (1991) strident decolonial allegory propelled Leslie Marmon Silko to the center of debates about the future of both liberal democracy and Indigenous sovereignty struggles. This article revisits how and why Silko was cast as a representative of liberal multiculturalism by scholars who championed and critiqued US liberalism in the wake of the Cold War, and reads her 1999 Gardens in the Dunes, a novel she describes as forming, with Almanac, a diptych “about capitalism and the effects of capitalism” (“Conversations” 118), in relation to these critical debates. It argues that the conclusion of Gardens in The Dunes engages with the Western genre as an allegorical means toward situating Silko’s commitment to Indigenous sovereignty in relation to the questions about the relation among law, violence, and democracy that animate so many Cold War westerns. The political orientation that emerges from this unlikely engagement with settler colonialism’s most recognizable genre is an allegorical vision of an Indigenous cosmopolitanism committed to both decolonial struggle and the universal liberatory ideals that liberalism espouses yet inevitably betrays.Through an oblique but unmistakable engagement with the Western genre . . . Gardens in the Dunes reaffirms Silko’s commitment to a broad vision of decolonization celebrating the universal liberatory ideals that US liberalism has betrayed.