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This chapter explores Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s less discussed works: the photo-texts Storyteller and Sacred Water. The chapter shows how rather than using images to illustrate or explain the text, Silko uses uncaptioned, floating images to create a “field of vision for the reading of the text,” thus emphasizing structurally a Pueblo sense of cyclical time. Pueblo identity, Silko insists, is defined by a long historical connection to place. She reveals how human relationships with land, plants, and animals link past, present, and future into a web of interdependence, highlighting her notion of an ecocentric, rather than homocentric, subjectivity.

This chapter presents a reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead. The novel offers a vision of the world caught in a struggle between a thanatopolitical culture of overdevelopment and death, and a vision of life that emphasizes the importance of respecting the material world and its forms of life. The novel describes the largely metropolitan tradition and the critiques of the life of late-capitalist William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and Dodie Bellamy. It also proposes a life that values the ecological and the material grounds upon which humans live.

In this chapter, Hsinya Huang examines the imagined space of the American tropics in Leslie Marmon Silko's novels, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes. Silko represents the tropics as a disturbing place where “torture is endemic” and deadly fever consumes countless indigenous lives. While fever mirrors the hotness of the environment, fever also functions as a metaphor for colonial trauma in the tropical Americas. Both novels chronicle a history of Native American slaughter. Outbreak of epidemic disease and the subsequent famine and drought permeate Silko's tropical narratives, acting out tribal trauma in the land itself. The tropics is a place where tribal and colonial histories intertwine and clash. Almanac of the Dead dramatises fever, famine, drought, and violence, whereas Gardens in the Dunes features herbs for healing and visions for strength. They should be read as twin texts to contest colonial epistemologies and entrenched relations of power and knowledge. As the almanac shows, in water there dwells a regenerative, life-giving power. Fever and drought give way to the healing power of rain clouds, semi-tropical gardens, and flora and fauna of enormous curative energies. In fever and drought is contained a living power, a potential for salvation.

Through Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), this chapter analyzes anxiety, an affect associated with rapidly changing political, technological, and environmental realities. As the inequalities inherent to technoscience emerged in the 1970s, women writers crafted speculative fictions to imagine the apocalyptic implications of interventions into bodies and the land. Through scenarios of bio- and ecotechnological horror and medicalizing tropes, body and land become vectors of anxiety—the affect that triggers concern about immoral technoscience, and neutralizes the capacity to resist its penetration of all domains of existence. Because it compromises human agency, apocalyptic anxiety is at odds with the revolutionary historiography that animates narratives of ecopolitical resistance.

The coda extends Olson’s and Baraka’s theories of breath and bodily incorporation from the previous chapter to quite different forms of contemporary writing, ranging from Native American Leslie Marmon Silko’s photo-poems, Sacred Water (1993), Juliana Spahr’s post-9/11 poem, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), to the various theoretical reappraisals of universalism in Judith Butler’s political theory and in Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003). We see that Olson and Baraka anticipate various recent attempts in art, literature, and critical theory to depict communitarian or other forms of social connection via breath or particularity in order to avoid universalism. This attempt is examined, critiqued, and contextualized. The Coda suggests that the aesthetic and political debates that Modernism’s Other Work explores continue in various texts and theoretical discussions ongoing today.

This chapter examines the works of first-generation renaissance writers Gerald Vizenor and Leslie Marmon Silko to address how their shared visions of indigenous Mexico constitute a point of convergence. The publication of Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead enabled the Greater Indian Territory to make a dramatic return to American Indian literature in 1991 and to expand into Canada, the Carribbean, and Central and South America. Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus is a narrative of migration and the creation of a new, sovereign Anishinabe tribal nation with significant Mayan origins; while in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, the Mayans play a central role in the emergent pan-North American indigenous rather than tribal nation-specific revolutionary movement.

Patrick B. Sharp, in “Questing for an Indigenous Future: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as Indigenous SF,” critiques the colonial imagination that produced both modern science and the “grammar of race” that codes all non-whites as incapable of contributing to the futures promised by science fiction by focusing on Silko’s use of illness and witchery to evoke the Cold War logic of nuclear apocalypse. Sharp explores how Silko uses the traditional Laguna concept of cyclical time, how Silko imagines the interconnectedness between all races, and how Silko thwarts the narrative of apocalypse, providing the foundation for an indigenous future that can heal the damage brought about by the colonial imagination.

While literary representations of indigenous peoples by non-Native writers now appear infrequently outside of popular genres, contemporary Native representations of Native orphan children have become common, which this study views as a literary trend growing out of widespread experiences of child removal and foster care, as well as of alternative child-rearing and kinship practices. In this chapter, key questions are posed to four works in which Native American orphan figures appear: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999). What “signifying capabilities” do Native American orphans have? What specific challenges to American and/or Native identity do authors respond to through their use of orphan figures? In what types of narrative or ideological processes are Native American orphans involved? The analysis suggests that authors use the figure of the orphan to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of American and Native nationhood, particularly in regard to their ability to accommodate, assimilate, or otherwise mediate difference. In the process, writers of fiction establish theoretical alliances or antipathies with multiculturalism as a model for American or Native social and political life.

This final chapter brings the historical argument to a close by examining forms of immanent critique in post-World War II American novels attempting to grapple with the geopolitics of the so-called “American Century.” Particular attention is paid to motifs of dangling, drifting, and “yo-yoing” in novels by Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon as well as relations between the irony of immanence and postmodern, postcolonial, and anti-imperialist re-imaginings of historical narrativization and representation. The chapter concludes by focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony in order to consider how the trope of “ground zero” first emerged in reference to the testing of the atom bomb in the American Southwest, and how the military-industrial development of uranium mining and nuclear power remain closely connected to concerns about American empire and cultural, ecological, and planetary survival in the post-9/11 era.

This chapter examines the hotly contested divide within postmodernism between a so-called first stage of predominantly white, male experimental writers and a so-called second stage of predominantly nonwhite, nonmale writers concerned with politics of race, class, gender, and nation. The author argues that social construction has served as the continental divide separating writers into these two stages, based on its commitment to demonstrating that social categories are made, rather than essential. But what if constructed and essential are not incongruous? Postmodern fiction posits no such incongruity. As a case in point, this chapter turns to the particularly troublesome relationship between postmodernism and Native writing as a means of redefining social construction and contending that the tension between construction and essentialism can be resolved by examining the everyday things that organize the lives of characters in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead describes characters struggling to survive amid the wreckage of finance and neoliberalism in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. These characters live according to scripts provided for them, above all, by “human capital,” the neoliberal concept that people are inseparable from the knowledge, skills, health, and values that comprise their market value or capacity to earn. Characters extend the logic of privatizing public goods to its limit: they monetize state policing (via insurance); human bodies (via black markets); torture (via snuff films); suicide (via art). In the tradition of syncretic indigenous apocalypticism, best known through the Ghost Dance religion, Silko imagines the novel’s eponymous almanac as an enigmatic indigenous object that incites the apocalypse and prepares a life after neoliberalism.

Focusing on the novels Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, and The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, Chapter 2 uses trauma theory to explore how histories of imperial domination refuse to be confined to the past. These two novels invite readers to identify to varying degrees with their traumatized protagonists, holding out the possibility of a resistant and revisionary “history from below.” Ultimately, however, a careful analysis of these two works reveals how literary trauma theorists, in their eagerness to give voice to the voiceless, are too readily taken in by the imaginative construct of the third-person narrator. While individual characters in these novels may suffer the cognitive distortions of trauma, the fragmentary, non-linear account that their readers receive is, in both cases, mediated by the presence of a narrator whose choices are conscious, volitional, and strategic.

This chapter assesses how attitudes started to shift at the beginning of the twentieth century—partly under the influence of Western movies, partly as modernist writers and artists started to idealize the Indian for their own ends, and as other wannabe Indians, most notably Grey Owl, began to develop the association of Indianness with environmental preservation. It also looks at some contemporary writing by native peoples—especially James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko—that aims to reappropriate nineteenth-century transatlantic history in a range of imaginative ways. By writing this fiction today, both Silko and Welch reclaim and rewrite the possibilities inherent for native peoples in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they demonstrate that despite the importance, then and now, of tradition as both concept and practice within Indian society, identity, and modes of thought, it stands not isolated from modernity, but rather in mediation and dialogue with it. At a time when critical attention within American studies has increasingly turned toward imperialism and transnationalism, to explore the importance of the transatlantic Indian is to provide an important reminder that the internal colonial relations of the United States cannot be separated from these other trajectories.