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

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 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.