Otherwise, Revolution!: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead 9781623568412, 9781501396397, 9781623569495

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OTHERWISE, REVOLUTION!

Otherwise, Revolution!

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Rebecca Tillett

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Rebecca Tillett, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Jane Hallett All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6841-2 PB: 978-1-5013-5809-8 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6949-5 eBook: 978-1-6235-6787-3 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTIONS

1 Part I OPPRESSION AND DISPOSSESSION

Chapter 2 SOCIAL (DIS)ORDERS: ‘VAMPIRE’ CAPITALISM, SOCIAL PRIVILEGE AND THE LAW

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Chapter 3 INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE: PATRIARCHY, GENDER AND SEXUALITY 

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Chapter 4 Discourses of difference: science, medicine and academia

87

Part II Resistance and Revolucíon Chapter 5 ‘The disappearance of all things European’: Revolucíon and relatedness

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Chapter 6 FIFTH World rising: the ‘Indian Connection’

143

Chapter 7 Armies of Justice: textual and extra-­textual ‘Revolucíon’ 161 Chapter 8 Afterword: another world is possible

179

References Index

183 195

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all members of the Native Studies Research Network, UK, past and present, who have been so generous in their support, enthusiasm and intellectual stimulation over the years. Thanks are also due to my colleagues in the Department of American Studies at the University of East Anglia; and special thanks are due to Joni Adamson, who provided such invaluable feedback and advice at a very early stage in this project. Above all, my thanks and love go to Mick and Jacob, who, as always, have been so patient and supportive.

Chapter 1 I ntroductions

Silko’s text in context If you make it all the way through Almanac, it makes you strong. But it’s like one of those stronger remedies. You do have to tell some people, hey, if it starts to bother you, put it down. Rest. Take it easy. Every now and then I’ll run into someone who, by god, read Almanac of the Dead in three days, just read it. And I’m like, whoa, isn’t it toxic to do that?1

Seven years after the publication of her controversial novel Almanac of the Dead (1991), Leslie Marmon Silko sounded a note of warning for any potential reader: while the novel was a ‘remedy’ for late twentieth-­century America that had the power to ‘mak[e] you strong’, too intense a dose was potentially ‘toxic’. These remain wise words: Almanac is a profoundly disturbing analysis of the workings and effects of late twentieth-­century capitalism that tracks the origins of both the capitalist system and the continued high status of a range of international social and corporate elites back to the emergence of early monopoly companies, and to the imperialist European cultural worldviews that initiated and facilitated the colonization of the ‘New World’. In a strategy that exposes the moral results of supposedly amoral economic and political systems, Almanac quite specifically identifies European greed and selfishness as the primary cause of widespread policies of genocide enacted against Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and the European slave trade as a market system inseparable from the development of national elites, national economies, transnational corporations, and capitalism itself. Moreover, Almanac traces historic injustices into the capitalist era, to link them firmly to contemporary social policies, and to the ways in which those policies not only derive from but also perpetuate ongoing social and economic injustices in the late twentieth century. It was no coincidence that Almanac was published to coincide with the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’s New World ‘discovery’: ‘the timing’, as Linda Niemann commented, was ‘perfect’ (1992: 1). Almanac’s readers are openly shown the processes of capitalism: violent excesses, exploitative depravity, and a corrupt and vicious commodification of

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everything and everyone. In Almanac’s late capitalist world, everything is ‘for profit’, and human bodies are again linked to the histories of slavery as they become commodities once more through the sale of human blood, tissue and body parts. Taking Karl Marx’s notion of ‘vampire capitalism’ to its limits, Silko depicts how human bodies are literally consumed, through portrayals of objectification, dismemberment and even cannibalism. In the dystopia of the text, we see writ large the European Enlightenment’s propensity for separation and categorization, a propensity that demands we accept the need for ‘scientific’ detachment – from life, from the world around us, from each other, ultimately from what makes us human. This detachment, this separation or atomization, this – to employ Marx’s own term – ‘alienation’, is coupled not only with individualism, with a privileging of the individual at all costs, but also with an over-­dependence on a corrupt market system that has no scruples and an insatiable desire to make ever-­increasing profits. Disturbingly, the textual result is the transformation of love – the ultimate human interaction – into lust, commodified sexualities, desire-­driven societies, and highly sexualized power structures. In the world of Almanac, it is unclear if love is compatible with the socio-­economic ‘system’ of the late twentieth century. Here, in place of the much theorized and celebrated post-­human, we are simply presented with the inhuman. Most worryingly, Almanac’s vision is depicted as our own potential future. In this context, Almanac exposes the most profoundly disturbing endgame of all: what results when our ‘scientific detachment’ includes a detachment – imaginative, philosophical, spiritual, physical – from the Earth itself. As a result, Almanac’s focus is profoundly Earth-­centred, the Earth is the central ‘character’ of an exploration of the ways in which ‘enlightened’ scientific detachment is predicated upon a separation of humanity from the natural world. Drawing directly upon the Enlightenment’s Christian antecedents, Silko’s text examines the results in the late twentieth century of the problematic hierarchy, outlined in the Book of Genesis, that places the natural world firmly under humankind’s ‘dominion’. It is no accident that ‘dominion’ can be defined as ‘supreme rule’, and Silko’s novel shows us the environmental and human devastation that happens when the tenets of European/Euro-American religion, science and capitalism converge to produce and promote a profoundly short-­sighted, short-­termist, yet virulent worldview that demands the quickest and highest profits at any cost. Almanac therefore traces the results of complexly historied European philosophical-­religious-political worldviews, to show how the exploitation at the heart of dominion is subsequently translated directly into the exploitative processes and practices of empire-­building and then of globalized corporate capitalism. Under such conditions, where dominion becomes supreme rule, the abusive treatment of the natural world is echoed in the abusive and inhuman treatment of the majority of the Earth’s human populations, and our very concepts of democracy are threatened. As the environmental writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams has so persuasively argued, not only is democracy to be

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described and understood in the context of the natural world as an ‘open space’, but that within ‘the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the wealth of our communities’ precisely because ‘our [human] character has been shaped by the diversity of America’s landscapes’ (2004: 8). In this context, the message in Almanac is clear: until and unless we treat the Earth with due respect, humankind will continue to suffer similar oppression and exploitation; the bodies of humans and the body of the Earth are quite literally related. To illustrate the virulence of these kinds of short-­termist profiteering, Silko’s novel is packed full of monstrous and inhuman characters. Regardless of culture, class, ethnicity, gender, ‘race’ or sexual orientation, there are few characters that are in any way sympathetic. Similarly, the excesses that Silko depicts, and the graphic nature of their depiction, are so all-­encompassing that they are often overwhelming. As its title suggests, the text is saturated with both the bodies and the presence of the dead, whose deaths are the result of five hundred years of colonialism in the Americas. Making explicit political connections to Toni Morrison’s dedication to her award-­winning 1987 novel Beloved,2 Silko points to ‘sixty million Native Americans’ who ‘died between 1500 and 1600’ (Almanac map legend).3 And every form of ‘unnatural’ death dominates the text, from suicide, to homicide, to genocide; as do a series of killers that range from military/governmental forces, powerful members of the social elites, serial killers, mafia hitmen, drug-­running gangs, and a range of business ‘entrepreneurs’. Everywhere, almost everything is ‘trafficked’, sold for profit: drugs, weapons, human bodies and body parts, illegal immigrants, land and natural resources. Perhaps the greatest human emphasis is upon sexual ‘commerce’, both consensual and non-­consensual, and including paedophilia and bestiality. Most overwhelming is the profiteering from the ‘sex industry’, with a market that has been imaginatively and lucratively expanded to showcase – if not to be dependent upon – human pain and misery. With appalling and often highly explicit detail, and drawing attention again to the potential end results of a rabid and out-­of-control capitalist system, Almanac not only shows the markets for, but also an industrialized production and distribution of, pornographic images and films; snuff movies; and secretly filmed videos of torture, violent sexual assault, abortions, foetal experiments and dissections, female circumcisions and gender realignment operations. Through a vast and expansive text, that ranges across and draws together diverse cultures, societies, geographies and temporalities, we are shown quite clearly how the many suffer dispossession and disenfranchisement at the hands of the few; and how those few abuse extreme inequalities in current socio-­political power structures in order to protect and extend their own position and status. And we are shown how these excesses and cruelties – the firm belief that certain elite groups have the right to profit at any cost – are predicated upon identical attitudes toward the natural world that have become so firmly established over the course of the last five centuries that they are now popularly accepted as ‘universal truths’.

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With such brutal description and violent imagery, it is perhaps unsurprising that Almanac demands of its readers very strong stomachs and high levels of endurance. Initially, many eager readers and critics alike reacted with horror, hostility and sheer bewilderment to the graphic and gruesome details of late capitalism’s underbelly. Moreover, since the majority of the action is set within the United States, and since the US is frequently identified as the epitome of individualistic and capitalist success, Silko’s novel was (and still is) also often interpreted as a direct attack on American culture and values. Among the early reviews, for instance, Richard Rorty argued that Almanac demonstrated a ‘wholehearted, gut-­wrenching disgust for white America’ (1998: 12); John Skow suggested that Silko ‘foretells with exultant rage’ the downfall of a ‘white society’ that she identifies as ‘murderous, corrupt, mad with greed and hideously perverted’ (1991: 57); and Malcolm Jones, Jr stated that Silko’s text was lacking in ‘fairness’ as ‘there are good people and there are white people’ (1991: 84).4 Overall, it was clear that Almanac’s initial reception demonstrated not only the shocking and disturbing nature of the text’s political focus, but also the profoundly unsettling effect this had upon Silko’s readers and reviewers. The fact that all of the reviews cited above seem to equate ‘American culture’ with a culture that is almost exclusively white and Euro-American is, of course, pertinent to Almanac’s depiction of dangerously short-­termist late-­twentieth-century thinking that derives from, and is enabled by, very specific and long-­standing Euro-American religious, political and scientific traditions. Reader responses have been as varied as those of the critics. Many early readers reacted with horror, and were quite literally bewildered, by the socio-­political apocalypse that Silko depicted. Since Silko very carefully depicts late-­twentiethcentury capitalist ‘culture’ as ‘wilderness’ – as a ‘place of wild beasts’, wild-­deor-ness (Nash 2001: 2) – this is perhaps not too surprising, especially as ‘wilderness’ is itself the etymological root of ‘bewilder’. Importantly, Silko’s depiction of capitalist culture as ‘wilderness’ draws very carefully upon early Puritan constructions and interpretations of the term in order to invert those ideas. As Roderick Nash has argued, wilderness is a concept specifically ‘created in a context of fear and opposition’ to the natural world, resulting in a forceful and powerful maintenance of humankind’s dominion over the natural world that is in direct opposition to the kinds of Indigenous cosmologies that Silko’s novel offers as a ‘remedy’ (2001: xiv). Silko’s novel acts not only to defamiliarize our understandings of contemporary human relationships with the natural world, but also to force us to see the moral dimensions of those relationships via a careful illumination of the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. As a result Almanac’s readers, the majority of whom draw upon unconscious (sometimes conscious) internalizations of Christian and scientific traditions of human–nature separation, are thrown into ‘a disordered, confused, or “wild” condition’ (Nash 2001: 2); and they are further, according to the definition of ‘bewilder’, also ‘thoroughly led astray’ so as to ‘lose [all] bearings’. Worse still, readers are themselves dangerously ‘lured into the wilds’.

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As a result, the socio-­cultural ‘wilderness’ of Silko’s text ensures that readers are thrust into ‘an alien environment where the civilization that normally orders and controls . . . life is absent’ (Nash 2001: 2) but which, paradoxically, is quite obviously directly related to the late-­twentieth-century capitalist world that they know. The Puritan construction of wilderness is, as Nash has commented, a world of brutal ‘savageness’ where, most significantly, one is immersed in ‘the moral chaos of the unregenerate’ (2001: 3). It is an apt summary both of Silko’s text and of a reading experience that is uncomfortable, and often painful. On almost every online website, the reader reviews for Almanac show a full range of responses from one to five stars. Comments on Amazon and Good Reads are especially fascinating, as readers clearly feel less constrained than critics in saying exactly what they think.5 As a result, readers identify the text as ‘flawed, paranoid, didactic’, ‘gratuitous and self-­indulgent’, and ‘excruciating’, with evidence of ‘extreme prejudice’. Unsurprisingly, many refer back to Silko’s earlier novel Ceremony (1977) as a benchmark for both literary style and political content, with one reader’s review stating that ‘this book would have benefitted greatly had the author collaborated with another writer, I don’t care who’. Many readers directly discuss the extremely painful nature of the reading: indeed, one comments that ‘[n]o book has ever made me physically ill until this one – headaches, nausea, nightmares, general disgust’. What is interesting, however, is that these readers nonetheless can clearly see the alternatives that Silko is at pains to identify: while readers are ‘forced to examine widely held assumptions about this [capitalist] economic system and the cultures in which it survives’; and, while reading Almanac ‘is like surviving a train wreck’, these readers feel they are nonetheless ‘better for the experience’. Perhaps the most pertinent comment is from the reader who states that ‘Silko has written the most disturbing work of fiction I have ever read – brutal, violent, vulgar, obscene, horrific, ugly, terrifying . . . and unfortunately true’. As another reader comments: ‘[a]nybody who thinks this is merely fiction is mistaken. This is reality, and it is happening as I type. [. . . .] We have been warned.’ Such reader responses suggest that Almanac is, at the very least, powerful in its impact. Accordingly, it is this power that demands continued and detailed study of Almanac, as does the intense disturbance and confusion that the text continues to provoke in readers and critics. During the first ten years of Almanac’s publication, there was, as Ann Folwell Stanford identified, an ‘intriguing silence’ (2003: 23) from critics, especially given the vehemence of some of the early reviews that, Caren Irr has suggested, interpreted the text as ‘suspiciously radical’ (1999: 223) because it forced critics to recognize and think through their own socio-­cultural assumptions and their moral dimensions. As a result, many of the early critical responses to Almanac fell into two distinct and opposing camps. For Joy Harjo, the very publication of Almanac acted to ‘change the shape and concept of the American novel’ whose form and content Silko ‘radicalizes’ (1992: 207, 208); while, in a later critical reading, Craig

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Womack argued that Almanac is quite simply ‘one of the most important books of . . . [the twentieth] century’ (1999: 252). And, although Linda Niemann accepted that ‘some readers will feel threatened’ by what she identifies as ‘a radical, stunning manifesto on this history of the Americas’, she nonetheless noted that Silko ‘picks up facts . . . and spins probable fictions forward into the near future’ (1992: 4, 1). For Niemann herself, the result is world-­changing: ‘I feel as though I have been changed, that Silko has achieved the critical mass needed to alter the way I perceive the world around me’ (1992: 1). In direct contrast, many other critics expressed outrage at the tone and content of Silko’s novel, and suggested that the text was driven by Silko’s own ‘half-­digested revulsion’ and ‘self-­righteousness’ (John Skow 1991), that the ‘tasteless[ness]’ of her plot demonstrated that she had committed ‘the classic error of the amateur’ (Alan Ryan 1992: D6), and that her ill-­judged focus was on ‘nothing less than a paper apocalypse’ (Sven Birkerts 1991: 41). As Irr concluded, these early reviews were ‘notable’ for their ‘venom’ (1999: 223), and much excellent critical scholarship has since emerged to address, interrogate, counter and correct these seemingly deliberate or even calculated early misreadings, particularly in terms of their reliance upon assumptions influenced by problematic preconceptions of culture, economics, race or gender.6 In the volume edited by Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays (1999), critics such as Caren Irr and Janet M. Powers addressed Sven Birkerts’ comments to provide a concise analysis of the reasons why Birkerts concluded that Almanac was a ‘failure’ (1991: 39). Within this collection, the first to engage at any length with Almanac, discussions ranged from the ‘potential of politically committed fiction’ (Irr 1999: 224) to the ways in which Birkerts’ own reliance upon one single cultural interpretation of ‘realism’ informed his refusal to accept that white culture may well be ‘destroying itself ’ much as Almanac depicts (Powers 1999: 271). The cultural politics of Silko’s text were also considered by Craig Womack in his 1999 study, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Womack’s conclusion was significant: Almanac was deemed ‘suspiciously radical’ by early reviewers because, unlike late-­twentieth-century society, its political focus was ‘not [on] entropy but [on] a redistribution of energy’ that could be deemed highly threatening (1999: 253). And, in an important consideration of the role of gender, Francine Prose interrogated the gendered biases that informed these reviews from male critics, to consider the ways in which the type of ‘gynobibliophobia’ each demonstrated is culturally entrenched, with few readers – male or female – willing to accept that women ‘write anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revolutionary or wise’ (1998). The adverse and even hostile reactions evident in these early reviews seem to demonstrate and confirm Prose’s assertion that one problem with reading Almanac is that we are being told ‘things we don’t want to hear – especially from women’ (1998). One of the most important critical voices and perspectives included in the 1999 Barnett and Thorson collection was that of David L. Moore, whose seminal

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scholarship on the role of the reader as a witness to Silko’s work continues to be highly influential. Moore’s concept of the ‘witnessing reader’ acted to facilitate a series of connections between Silko’s fictional text and a range of extra-­textual contemporary ‘realities’. Discussing Silko’s earlier novel Ceremony, Moore drew distinct comparisons between key events in Silko’s text and the traditional Laguna tales of her heritage, in particular her deployment of the concept of ‘witchery’. In Silko’s first novel, witchery encompasses all kinds of wickedness, including destruction, oppression, exploitation and manipulation; with those who practise such tactics being identified – in accordance with traditional Laguna thinking – as Kunideeyars or Gunadeeyahs, the Destroyers whom Silko identifies as ‘worshippers of suffering and destruction’.7 In his reading, Moore compared the role of the protagonist Tayo in Ceremony with that of Estoy-­eh-nuut, or Arrowboy, in the Laguna story of Arrowboy and the witches, identifying the figure of Arrowboy as the ‘typographic and geographic core’ of Silko’s work (1999: 149). If, as Harjo contended, Almanac is ‘an exploded version’ of Ceremony (1992: 209) addressing the local/localized concerns of Ceremony on global scale, then Moore’s argument continues to have both relevance and weight. In the Laguna story, the evil planned by the group of witches cannot work because of the physical presence of Arrowboy; indeed, it is Arrowboy’s ‘gaze’ that acts to witness the witches’ actions, and so actively prevents the doing of evil (Moore 1999: 150). It is this specular and witnessing presence that, Moore argued, both Ceremony and Almanac attempt to recreate by demanding the reader take on the role of witness, so that readers themselves can quite literally ‘effect a different reality’ (1999: 151). Moore’s readings suggest Almanac is a difficult reading experience that makes quite specific demands upon its readers, requiring not only a recognition of the witchery evident in the horrors and excesses of the late twentieth century, but also an equal recognition that there are alternatives. Placing its reader in the role of Arrowboy, Almanac demands that we not only see but recognize oppression and injustice of every kind, and that our witnessing gaze reaches beyond the text and into the ‘real’ world, to see, recognize, and ultimately prevent (through its very presence) ‘real’ oppression and injustice. Silko’s premise in Almanac is simple: if the majority of abuses of power globally occur (and have always occurred) because they are not seen and there are no witnesses, then we all need to be both more aware and more vigilant; if we continue to accept damaging power structures and ideologies simply because those at the centre of power within those structures tell us there is no viable alternative, then we must start to ask questions about what we have been persuaded to accept as the ‘natural’ order of things. In this context, witnessing becomes ‘a mode of . . . accessing reality’ (Felman and Laub 1992: xx), and Silko’s text clearly explores the relationships between puritanical worldviews that deliberately alienate themselves from a subjugated natural world and a range of Indigenous cosmologies that expose the profound interconnections between human beings and the Earth. Above all, Almanac demands that its readers engage and think, that they be active if not activist. Translated extra-­textually into the ‘real’ world, Almanac’s

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readers can make tentative but often equally ‘real’ connections between the atrocities of the text and the abuses that occur daily around the world. Significantly, Almanac demands an extra-­textual vigilance from readers, whose acts of witnessing and specular presence have the power to curb the excesses of governments, corporations, and all others that privilege ‘profit over people’ (Chomsky 1999), even if those curbs only emerge as a result of an unprofitable rise in the public relations costs of dealing with an unexpected wider public awareness. As the Destroyers comment, in Silko’s earlier retelling of the Arrowboy tale: ‘Ck’o’yo magic won’t work/if someone is watching us’ (1981: 259); Almanac’s witnessing readers are not merely ‘seeing’ but ‘seeing through’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 209). Moore’s innovative scholarship continues to influence work in the field precisely because it facilitates connections between Silko’s text and a range of extra- and post-­textual ‘realities’. As a result, Almanac has become the focus of a growing range of diverse critical interventions. Significantly, much of the most important, stimulating, and cutting-­edge scholarship in recent years has emerged from a deliberate engagement with Almanac’s own subject matter, in particular its focus upon social and environmental justice. Recent scholarship has begun to bridge a range of diverse disciplinary subject areas in important and exciting ways, bringing together the concerns and interests of border studies, Indigenous studies, environmental studies, ecocritical studies, environmental humanities, climate change studies, social justice studies, and urban studies; plus the intersections of fields such as economics, sociology, sustainability and politics. One of the earliest and most influential ecocritical analyses of Almanac appeared in Joni Adamson’s 2001 study, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Here, Adamson not only provided a detailed critique of Alan Ryan’s ‘dismissal’ of Silko’s novel due to his perception of it as somehow culturally ‘inauthentic’, but was one of the first critics to explore the text in terms of the significance of its environmental messages (2001: 133).8 Adamson’s subsequent work on Almanac has proved equally influential, firmly situating Silko’s fictional concerns within the ‘real-­ world’ concerns of contemporary Indigenous epistemologies and transAmerican Indigenous politics and policies. Adamson’s early interrogations of the intersections of Almanac’s politics with later extra-­textual events explored events such as the emergence in 1994 of the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, that much resembled the People’s Army of Almanac, which engaged directly with the kinds of ‘vampire capitalism’ embodied in the national economic interests of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Adamson’s discussion both of Almanac’s assertion that capitalism is predicated upon environmental devastation and of the ways in which the ‘prophec[ies]’ of the text are both accurate and unnerving was expanded in her subsequent work that considers the importance of Silko’s text to an Indigenous ‘revolutionary imagination’ in the Americas (2001, 2012c). Adamson has since considered the ways in which Almanac’s focus on the Earth both predicts and

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provides reflections of more recent events, such as the ground-­breaking rewriting in 2008 of the Ecuadorean Constitution to include ‘Rights for Nature’, the 2010 Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that emerged from the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change (Bolivia), and the resulting Bolivian legislation, Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (Law of the Rights of Mother Earth) of 2010, which formally recognized the rights of the Earth (2012a).9 In this context, Adamson’s work on Silko’s Almanac engages with important developments in the environmental humanities, such as Rob Nixon’s award-­winning scholarship on the ‘slow violence’ enacted by the ‘short-­ termist’ and ‘for-­profit’ perspective of global capitalism upon the environment and upon poor communities. As Nixon very persuasively argues, because this slow violence ‘occurs gradually and out of sight’, it is not only ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispelled across time and space’, it is also virtually impossible to resist because it is a violence that is ‘attritional’ and so ‘typically not viewed as violence at all’ (2011: 2). Drawing on Nixon’s conceptualizations of the ‘calamitous repercussions’ that ‘pla[y] out across a range of temporal scales’ (2011: 2), Adamson’s work also engages directly with newly developing literary genres and fields of literary scholarship, such as the growing critical interest in literary responses to climate change evident in ‘Cli-Fi’, or climate fiction. Adamson’s field-­leading work is thus constantly navigating and assessing the complex relationships between literary texts and diverse scholarly fields, and putting into dialogue important topics such as the increasing international recognition of the value of Indigenous cosmospolitics (2012a), the significance of environmental and political organization, and the increasing global significance in the twenty-­first century of issues such as environmental sustainability, climate change and food sovereignty (2012b, 2012c). Many of Adamson’s interdisciplinary concerns have provided a foundation for a range of recent critical interventions. In her 2008 study Border Fictions, Claudia Sadowski-Smith situated her own analysis of Almanac firmly within the field of border studies. Developing Adamson’s focus on the far-­reaching socio-­economic and environmental implications of the NAFTA legislation, Sadowski-Smith considered the ways in which ‘globalization, US empire, and nationalism’ play key roles in the creation and manufacture of American domestic and foreign policy (2008: 143). Assessing Almanac’s depiction of borders and border-­crossing in the Americas through a ‘spatialized lens’, Sadowski-Smith explored ‘national space’ and the relationships between individuals or communities and the land, to discuss the political potential for/of Indigenous political organization at a ‘hemispheric level’ (2008: 139, 74). Sadowski-Smith’s advocation of ways of reading that embrace ‘national, international, transnational, and certainly pan-­ethnic formations’ has proved both thought-­provoking and persuasive (2008: 144). Related and complementary readings drawing on Adamson’s work have also been offered in the field of Native/Indigenous studies. In her 2009 study Mapping the Americas, Shari M. Huhndorf demonstrated the ways in which Almanac demonstrates important

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methods for contemporary Indigenous ‘transnational politics’. Employing an interdisciplinary focus that considers Native/Indigenous studies within the wider framework of American studies, and drawing in important yet often elided analyses of ‘gender, imperialism [and] class’, Huhndorf argued that the kinds of Indigenous ‘transnational alliances’ depicted in Almanac are ‘the most powerful . . . [albeit] contradictory . . . form of anti-­colonial resistance’ (2008: 2, 141). For Huhndorf, Almanac’s textual approach both prefigures and embodies contemporary critical discussions in the field regarding the centrality of Indigenous worldviews and epistemologies to Indigenous studies scholarship. The significance of Silko’s novel for Huhndorf, therefore, is that it ‘broadens the questions that currently define Native Studies’, exposing crucial relationships between ‘global . . . colonialism and capitalism’ (2009: 171, 2). These connections between global colonialism and capitalism are addressed by T. V. Reed, who further develops Adamson’s pioneering environmental and ecological work. In his 2009 consideration of ‘Toxic Colonialism, Environmental Justice, and Native Resistance’ in Almanac, Reed situated both his critical approach and Silko’s text at the ‘intersection of post- or de-­colonial theory and practice, and transnational movements for environmental justice’.10 Reed identified his approach as ‘decolonial environmental justice cultural studies’ (2009: 25). Here, Reed’s analysis breaks new ground by arguing ‘not that an environmental justice cultural criticism can be applied to Almanac of the Dead, but rather that Almanac of the Dead was already doing global decolonial environmental justice cultural criticism many years before the field was named, and that critics still need to catch up with Silko’ (2009: 25). Reed’s emphasis both on the role of protest literature and the need to address the human ramifications of global warming and climate change has subsequently also been considered by Elizabeth Ammons. In her 2010 study Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet, Ammons pointed both to the importance of the role of the humanities in challenging the environmentally dangerous attitudes of late global capitalism, and to the central role that Almanac demands of its readers: the need for personal and global ‘transformation’ and the ‘necessity of action’ (2010: 167, original emphasis). It was, in part, an acknowledgement of Reed’s assertion that the critics still need to catch up with Silko that produced my own edited critical collection of 2014, Howling For Justice: New Perspectives on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Showcasing some of the most recent and innovative scholarship on Almanac, this volume recognized the early – and often ongoing – critical silences, hostilities and misreadings, and drew attention to the perplexing fact that it was – and still is – the first collection of critical essays to focus solely upon Silko’s problematic and contentious novel. Howling For Justice also pointed directly to the stimulating and diverse scholarship outlined above, stating its desire to include and address critical perspectives from varied fields of study in order to engage both with the concerns of Silko’s text, and with the subsequent extra-­ textual applications of, and interventions into, those concerns. The collection,

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therefore, clearly stated that its aim was to contribute to ‘ongoing scholarly debates regarding the relevance and intellectual value of a multidisciplinary approach to key topics in Native studies’; and, perhaps even more importantly, to engage with ‘recent inter- and trans-­disciplinary readings, to provide new perspectives from a diverse range of scholarly fields and approaches that more fully reflect the transnational and transcultural nature of Almanac and its politics’ (2014: 9). In this context, the volume included (and concluded with) a new interview with Silko that discussed Silko’s own perceptions of the reception of Almanac over the two decades and more since its publication. Many of the collection’s contributions made important connections to previous scholarship, and significant interventions on diverse topics such as disability studies, medical discourse, sexuality and abject sexualities, environmental and social justice, political activism, activist movements, urban environments, the gothic, Marx and capitalism, audience and critical reception, and communities and relatedness. One highly significant strand of thought that was woven throughout the collection was a consideration of the ways in which Silko’s extremely hopeless and dystopian text paradoxically and contradictorily both embraced and offered a sense of hope: a sense that ‘the depraved worlds depicted are – and can be – countered by the recognition and adoption of an alternative worldview based on Indigenous concepts of reciprocity and justice’ (2014: 8). Two contributions within the collection were particularly significant and exciting developments because they extended earlier seminal work. In the first, David L. Moore further considered the role of the reader-­as-witness in the context of ecology, and explored Silko’s development of an ‘ethical grammar’ and an ‘ecologic of peace’ as a means by which readers can interrogate the interactions between ‘communal interconnection and individual cooperation’ (2014: 172, 178, 12). In the second, Joni Adamson assessed the ‘re-­emergence of the [Indigenous] pluriverse’ to investigate the ways in which Almanac can also be used to productively read twenty-­first-century extra-­textual and post-­textual Indigenous environmental politics and political activism, and a range of important recent international laws (2014: 187). Otherwise, Revolution! engages with and contributes to these ongoing critical discussions surrounding Silko’s Almanac. Drawing together some of the diverse critical dialogues that have proved most productive in providing nuanced, thought-­provoking and pertinent readings for the twenty-­first century, this study further builds upon the seminal work of both Moore and Adamson, and engages with important theoretical and political developments in the fields of both environmental studies and Indigenous studies, Otherwise, Revolution! provides an extended analysis of Silko’s text to offer some useful ways of reading Almanac for the reader who is bewildered, and to offer some potential ‘remedies’ for some of the text’s long-­standing and entrenched misreadings. Indeed, this study demonstrates the ways in which, unlike her critical reviewers, Silko guides her reader through the dangerous individualistic wilderness of the text to show how cooperation, community and the ability to acknowledge the human and

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natural world as a holistic whole provides a clear and sustainable ‘remedy’ for the disposability and sterility of late-­twentieth-century capitalist culture. Most importantly, in this context of sustainability, Otherwise, Revolution! is a profoundly Earth-­centred analysis, which explores the workings of social and environmental justice in the face of the social and environmental damage caused by the policies and practices of global capital. Like Silko’s novel, Otherwise, Revolution! firmly locates the events and political messages of Almanac within a wider awareness of Indigenous cosmopolitics and Earth-­ centred legislation and policies, recognizing that the protagonist of the text is the Earth itself. Otherwise, Revolution! is, therefore, a deliberate intervention into an ongoing critical dialogue that explores the toxicity of Silko’s novel, while assessing the full potential – and hope – of the literary, socio-­cultural, political and ecological remedy that the text offers.

Silko’s textual ‘Revolucíons’   La gente tiene hambre. La gente tiene frío. Los ricos han robado la tierra. Los ricos han robado la libertad.   La gente exige justicia. De otra manera, Revolucíon.   The people are hungry. The people are cold. The rich have stolen the land. The rich have stolen freedom.   The people cry out for justice. Otherwise, Revolution.11 This study takes its title from the quotation cited above, the blunt and profoundly political Spanish inscription that Silko added to the large outdoor mural she painted on the side of the Tucson office building where she was writing Almanac during 1986 to 1987, and an image of which is included on the cover of this study. Depicting a giant snake emerging from rain and rainclouds, symbolic of the physical presence and blessings of Silko’s Laguna ancestors, a series of skulls filled the entire body of the snake to visually emphasize the ongoing presence of those departed Indigenous ancestors: some of the many dead bodies that are evident within Silko’s novel. Quite notably, the skulls were visually distinct from one another in the mural, demanding a recognition of the individuality, and so also the humanity, of each of those dead beings. Silko’s inclusion of a written message underlined the snake’s textual role as a messenger; the fact that the message was Spanish also presented a political challenge to the actions of the Arizona administration during this period which had, according to Silko, undertaken politically oppressive action to ‘outla[w] . . . Spanish’ and make English ‘the legal language’ of the state.12 Silko’s mural, therefore, offered a powerful contemporary resistance to Arizona’s political treatment of dispossessed citizens in the late 1980s, demonstrating what Silko herself has long identified as the ‘real-­world’ echoes and reflections of the complex

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apocalyptic political themes of her novel. These real-­world reflections included the continued presence of the elided histories of US settlement within American popular consciousness; the continued social, political and economic oppression of poor, dispossessed and ‘othered’ Americans; and – as a direct result of these myriad forms of oppression – the very real and ever-­present threat of an emphatically capitalized ‘Revolucíon’ of the dispossessed. As its title suggests, Otherwise, Revolution! is a response not simply to Silko’s novel and its multiple contexts (including responses from readers and critics), but also to Silko’s own conceptualization of ‘Revolucíon’. One of the earliest and most hostile critical responses to Almanac focused on just this topic, with Sven Birkerts arguing that the revolutionary ‘insurrection’ of the text demonstrated that Almanac was not only ‘an enactment of wish-­fulfilment scenarios’ but therefore also not literature ‘of the first order’ (1992: 41). Birkerts’ comments on oppression and insurrection are significant enough to cite in full: that the oppressed of the world should break their chains and retake what’s theirs is not an unappealing idea (for some), but it is so contrary to what we know both of the structures of power and the psychology of the oppressed that the imagination simply balks. [. . .] [Silko’s] premise of revolutionary insurrection is tethered to airy nothing. It is, frankly, naïve to the point of silliness. (1992: 41)

Birkerts’ own use of language here, with its inbuilt socio-­cultural hierarchical codes and its reliance upon the tenets of corporate capitalism, is fascinating. Birkerts’ use of the term ‘we’ is both inclusive and exclusive. He carefully includes his reader: ‘we’ know what he knows, ‘our’ cultural values are thus clearly identical. ‘We’ know, therefore, that the ‘structures of power’ are unassailable, that the ‘psychology of the oppressed’ is sufficiently self-­policing to prevent any challenge to the status quo, that the idea of socio-­political rebellion of any kind is appealing only ‘for some’, who must be carefully distanced from ‘us’ via parenthesis. The implication, of course, is that any serious consideration of the possibility of alternative ways of looking at, thinking about, or being in the world, is not to be countenanced, not something that ‘we’ would or should do. Silko’s own worldview, and thus Indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics more widely, are therefore firmly excluded; and her vision is purposely demoted and de-­fused through the highly judgemental, deeply patronizing, and deliberately racialized and gendered use of language, in particular Birtkerts’ unexpectedly ‘critical’ use of the term ‘silliness’. My readings of Silko’s novel in this study refute and reject this kind of deliberate critical misreading of the role of ‘Revolucíon’ in Silko’s text, this deliberate refusal to acknowledge that there might be any alternative to the late capitalist worldview, this deliberate attempt to de-­fuse Silko’s textual political message, and this deliberate shutting down of any possibility of textual (or extra-­textual) hope. The facts, as Ammons has

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bluntly commented, are irrefutable: it is ‘Revolution [that] propels Almanac’ (2010: 163). Accordingly, Silko’s conceptualization of ‘Revolucíon’ propels my own readings here: of the textual events and politics; of the ways in which Almanac retains its significance for American cultures in the twenty-­first century, and for twenty-­first-century global cultures more widely; of the ways in which Silko’s novel prefigures and speaks directly to increasingly important international concerns surrounding environmental destruction and sustainability. ‘Revolucíon’ certainly propels my main arguments here: that revolution is itself a natural process linked to the natural world; that the Earth and our relationships with it are of central significance if we are to achieve any form of social or environmental justice; that late capitalist societies not only risk too much but can learn valuable lessons from the inherent sustainability of Indigenous epistemologies. In this context, as I will discuss in detail shortly, my analyses here build upon the ground-­breaking scholarship already undertaken by scholars such as Adamson, Moore, Nixon, Reed, Huhndorf, Sadowski-Smith and Ammons. Silko’s conceptualization of ‘Revolucíon’ is deliberately and unapologetically multi-­faceted and multi-­signifying. Silko’s textual ‘Revolucíon(s)’ can certainly be straightforwardly defined as the use of violence to end a period of ‘misrule’ by elected and unelected social, political and corporate elites. Indeed, Almanac has an abundance of examples of such misrule, and a growing number of dispossessed others increasingly willing to risk everything to end the abuse of power by a dominant minority. Yet this definition, taken as it often is as the only meaning of the term ‘revolution’, often obscures other definitions that have even more pertinent and suggestive connotations in the context of Silko’s text. This includes revolution as a ‘change of paradigm’ in human worldviews, lifestyles and working practices; as the completion of one life cycle and the beginning of another; and as a continual and emphatically ‘natural movement or process’. Almanac foregrounds ‘Revolucíon’ as a natural process, part therefore of the natural order of things. We should not forget, after all, that ‘revolution’ has direct etymological links to the ‘radical’, one of whose meanings is a ‘relatedness to’, or a ‘proceeding from’, the ‘root of a plant’. As a result, both ‘Revolucíon’ and the ‘radical’ are inextricably linked to fundamental processes of the natural world. Silko’s text thus draws upon and returns to earlier definitions of ‘Revolucíon’ that delineate natural planetary processes, and emphasize ‘Revolucíon’ as part of the natural order of the Earth and its inhabitants. Importantly, these concepts can be found at the heart of revolutionary American intellectual thought: Thomas Paine’s influential definitions of revolution pointed not only to revolution’s ‘cosmic force’ but equally to the need for, as Peter Linebaugh has argued, ‘the restoration of balance in a world that is otherwise out of whack’ (2014: 190). Almanac’s focus on ‘Revolucíon’ thus highlights the term’s relationship to ‘rotation’: where possible definitions or interpretations range from the simplest agricultural practices that ‘use continual movement to avoid sterility and to promote growth and development’, to the more complex ways in

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which social and political sterility can itself be avoided by the ‘regular and continual passing of privilege or responsibility between and among all members within a group or society’. Accordingly, Silko’s ‘Revolucíon’ points directly to notions that lie at the very heart of human concepts of equality and democracy, and which are not only drawn from, but actively include, the Earth itself. As Silko’s mural inscription pertinently demonstrates, the theft of ‘land’ in her novel equates directly to the theft not simply of physical sustenance, but also of individual and collective ‘freedom’ and futures. It is this natural and Earth-­focused ‘Revolucíon’, and the alternative epistemologies and courses of action that it represents, that is the focus of the study of Almanac presented here. Otherwise, Revolution! explores the ways in which Almanac’s emphasis upon the natural and earthly process of ‘Revolucíon’ engages with two crucially important extra-­textual strands of thought. First, the centrality of the Earth to many Indigenous worldviews across the Americas, which Silko’s text explores and foregrounds. Second, the emergence in the 1980s – the era in which Silko’s novel is set and to which it provides a response – of the environmental justice movement, both as a development of the earlier social justice movement and as a response to greater awareness of environmental racism and its effects. In its emphasis upon and consideration of complex Earth-­centred Indigenous worldviews, Almanac can increasingly be read in the context of political and environmental developments in the Americas in the first decades of the twenty-­ first century. These decades have seen unprecedented global attention focused upon Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies due to increasingly widespread recognition among scientists and politicians of the realities and dangers of human-­made climate change, and a growing awareness of the need for greater sustainability in human relationships with the natural word. For Adamson, the global focus upon Indigenous cosmopolitics demonstrates a growing international recognition of a fundamental Indigenous philosophy: that ‘a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant’ (2012a: 148). And this is equally evident both in contemporary political events in the Americas, and in recent developments in Indigenous critical scholarship. Recent political events have seen the emergence of Earth-­focused Indigenous political movements such as Idle No More, which began in Canada in 2012 with the stated aim to ‘cal[l] on all people to join in a peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water’. Crucially, in the context of the oft-­cited ‘anticipatory’ or ‘prophetic’ nature of Silko’s text, Idle No More makes clear the irrefutable connections between human beings and their environments and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups via its invitation to ‘everyone to join in’; and exposes the environmental and social damage done by global capitalism via corporate ‘neo-­colonialism’, offering to provide ‘hope and love at a time when global corporate profits rule’.13 Since 2016, the increasing relevance of Earth-­centred politics has been evident in the growing visibility of a range of Indigenous environmental activism directed against the imposition

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of dangerous corporate philosophies that dictate dangerous corporate practices. From the controversy over the Tar Sands Keystone Pipeline, finally rejected by President Obama in 2015 because the extraction processes and aboveground transportation of oil were considered too environmentally hazardous, to (as I write) the ongoing dispute over the Dakota Access Pipeline (NDAPL) with its equally potentially devastating environmental and human effects, Indigenous activists have taken care to publicly present the cosmopolitics of their activism to show the complex relationships between social/environmental justice and the profound sustainability of Indigenous worldviews. It is crucial, for instance, that Indigenous activists for NDAPL have refused to be labelled simply as ‘protestors’ but rather have drawn careful attention to their roles as environ­ mental protectors, a role linked directly to Indigenous sovereignty. Given the unprecedented election of Donald J. Trump in late 2016 as the first climate change ‘denier’ to hold office in the White House, a president who has inescapable ties both to the oil industry and to corporate concerns more widely,14 Indigenous cosmologies will no doubt continue to be globally both visible and highly pertinent in the first decades of the twenty-­first century. Recent developments in Indigenous critical scholarship have followed a similar trajectory, providing detailed, nuanced and highly pertinent consi­dera­ tions of the ways in which critical theory within Indigenous studies might both reflect and meaningfully engage with Indigenous cosmopolitics. Partic­ularly influential on my own readings here has been Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014), which not only provides a fascinating case study of the Idle No More movement, but posits a theoretical framework through which to consider the interactions of Indigenous politics and cosmologies evident in Adamson’s use of the term ‘cosmopolitics’. Having discussed a series of theoretical positions that fail to address Indigenous concerns, often because they fail to recognize the cosmological differences embedded within Indigenous politics, Coulthard has argued that, because ‘dispossession continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique’, that Indigenous theory and practice is: best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land – a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms. (2014: 13, original emphasis)

Within his argument for a ‘place-­based foundation’ for ‘Indigenous decolonial thought and practice’, the crucial term used by Coulthard is ‘grounded normativity’, where ‘our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others’ are both ‘inform[ed] and structure[d]’ by ‘the modalities of Indigenous land-­connected practices and long-­standing

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experiential knowledge’ (2014: 13, original emphasis). In this context, the readings of Silko’s novel here owe a great deal to Coutlhard’s concept of ‘grounded normativity’.15 The second extra-­textual strand of thought that is equally significant to this study is the development of, and inter-­relationships between, the social justice and environmental justice movements. Indeed, in its focus upon the kinds of regular and continual passing on of privilege or responsibility embodied within the concept and meaning of ‘Revolucíon’, Almanac maps many of the founding principles of both the social justice and environmental justice movements. In pointing to the connections between these two related political movements, Almanac emphasizes ways in which concepts of social justice – the equal distribution of wealth, opportunities and privileges within a society – cannot be separated from concepts of environmental justice – defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency as ‘the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies’.16 My readings here of Almanac, therefore, engage with the ways in which the text considers how wide-­ranging environmentalist concerns converge with the deep-­seated problems – of profound inequality, and a lack of social or environmental justice – caused by the economic, political and social worldviews required to successfully drive late capitalism; and with the ways that Almanac demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies offer not only sustainable ways of living, but also increasingly important social, environmental and political alternatives to the damaging worldviews of late capitalism. If, as Ammons has argued, literature has the power to affect its audiences enough to ‘transform people’ and even ‘save the planet’ (2010: ix), then these are crucially important messages that we need to take from Silko’s text. Ammons’s argument engages directly with ecocriticism and with the emerging field of the environmental humanities; and, in this context, the greatest influence on my own readings here has been Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). Nixon’s text is, as Mary Louise Pratt has argued, ‘foundational’ for the emerging environmental humanities due to its abilities to ‘conjugat[e] ecologism, anti-­imperialism and anti-­capitalism’ (2012: 298–9); while its central concept of slow violence has the potential, as Stephanie LeMenager has suggested, to ‘invigorate critical conversation for years to come’ (2012: 301). Nixon’s conceptualization is of the attritional nature of a ‘corrosive’ social and environmental violence that impacts upon the very poorest communities internationally, but which we cannot easily see because it is enabled and facilitated by the ‘gaps between acts of slow violence and their delayed effects’ that allow for both ‘memory and causation [to] readily fade from view and the casualties thus incurred pass untallied’ (2006–7: 14). Nixon’s definition of the effects of slow violence as ‘long dyings’ (2006–7: 14) therefore provides interesting and productive ways of reading Silko’s assertion that the late-­twentieth-century events of Almanac emerge from and are

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predicated upon historical Indian wars that have ‘never ended in the Americas’ (1991: map legend). While Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence demonstrates the deeply unequal effects and impacts of global neo-­liberalism, it also demonstrates the invisible processes and equally invisible partnerships between global neo-­liberalism and neo-­imperialism (2012: 308), and demands that we ‘give symbolic shape and plot to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across time and space’ (2006–7: 14). It is, primarily, through language that Nixon makes visible these invisible relationships, through the deployment of a ‘corporate’ terminology to discuss the profound forms of slow violence that emerge via neo-­liberal processes of ‘outsourced suffering’, ‘inhabited risks’ and ‘petrodespotism’ (2011: 22, 4, 68). Nixon’s demand that we perceive the workings of these forces requires us to ‘confront the dilemma’ that he identifies as first raised in the 1960s by Rachel Carson’s notion of ‘death by indirection’ and how that might be successfully, or even adequately, narrativized and storied (2006–7: 14). Nixon’s text, therefore, explores the ways in which the creative prose of ‘writer-­activists’ and/or ‘activist-­ writers’ makes visible the invisible workings of slow violence. As Pratt aptly comments, Nixon’s writer-­activists have the ability to ‘spectacularize slow violence, [and] the “disasters that star nobody” on a world stage’ (2012: 299). It is, importantly, a role that Silko herself seems to have embraced: as she stated in a recent interview discussing her approach to writing novels such as Almanac, ‘my job is to shine a light into darkness that no one likes to go into’ (Tillett 2014a: 215). Consequently, Nixon’s conceptualizations have proved invaluable for my readings in this study, not only of Silko’s own role as a writer-­activist, but also of the forms and effects of slow violence within her novel. Nixon’s demand, once we can clearly see the workings of slow violence made visible for us by such writer-­activists, is for us to participate in a twofold resistance. First, against the ‘crisis of futurity’ that global neo-­liberalism is creating; second, against its predication upon a ‘crisis of disparity’ (2012: 303). At its heart, therefore, Nixon’s influential text is a call to ‘Revolucíon’ in Almanac’s sense of the term; and, importantly for Silko’s novel, it represents a call for a form of justice where the social and the environmental are not only unseparated but inseparable. The significance of Nixon’s discussions of justice for Silko’s text is profound: the concept of ‘Revolucíon’ within Almanac is, notably, linked emphatically to notions of justice of all kinds. As Silko’s mural inscription bluntly states, the people ‘demand justice’. Yet ‘justice’ as a concept is notoriously malleable, subject as it is to the mutability, even indeterminability, of language. While ‘justice’ is often interpreted solely as the ‘process of using laws to fairly judge and punish crimes and criminals’, as ‘the administration of law’, and as ‘the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims’, justice has far wider moral or ethical meanings that are equally pertinent to Silko’s text. For instance, ‘the establishment or determination of rights’, the ‘quality of being just or fair’, the ‘principle of just dealing or right action’, and – perhaps most significantly – a ‘conformity to truth, fact, or reason’. Indeed, in the context of Silko’s novel, justice ranges across

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all of these meanings to include a moral recognition of injustice, not just by victims of that wrongdoing but also by perpetrators or wrongdoers and by witnesses or bystanders. As a result, Almanac’s focus on justice both demonstrates and amplifies its presentation of, and interpretation as, a ‘moral history’ of the Americas.17 Almanac thus draws together the extra-­textual concerns of the social and environmental justice movements to demonstrate their profound interconnections, and foregrounds traditional Indigenous worldviews to suggest that social equality cannot and will not be achieved unless and until it includes a recognition of the Earth as a living being entitled to the same equal rights. This, naturally, also includes a recognition of the rights of all other non-­ human living beings inhabiting the Earth. An important part of Silko’s ‘Revolucíon’ is an exposure of the lengthy histories and pedigrees of injustice, from the worldviews that generated the imperial impulse and the genocides that accompanied the European settlement of the ‘New World’, to contemporary forms of economic neo-­imperialism and global capitalism that, since they emerge from the same worldviews, are predicated upon and promote remarkably similar forms of injustice. As Silko pertinently commented in her 1996 essay collection, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit, This is no new war. This war has a five-­hundred-year history. This is the same war of resistance that the Indigenous people of the Americas have never ceased to fight . . . Human beings are also natural forces of the earth. There will be no peace in the Americas until there is justice for the earth and her children. (1996a: 149–51)

Significantly, this is a justice that, while ominously missing from the pages of Almanac, nonetheless continues to be sought: by the dead souls within the novel, who continue to ‘howl’ for a justice that they have been denied (1991: 723); and via ongoing extra-­textual twenty-­first-century attempts to overturn the environmental and social injustices upon which the successful (i.e. profitable) operation of transnational capitalism in an era of globalization seems to be predicated. In order to trace the simplest possible path through the complex stories and politics of Silko’s text, Otherwise, Revolution! is divided into two parts: ‘Oppression and dispossession’, and ‘Resistance and Revolucíon’. The first shows in no uncertain ways the individual and communal dangers of late capitalist society; the second explores the possibilities and potential that Indigenous cosmopolitical visions offer, and assesses the ways in which Almanac demonstrates both textual hope and the suggestion of a ‘remedy’. Above all, the second section traces Almanac’s emphasis upon obligation. ‘Oppression and dispossession’ contains three chapters that explore a variety of ways in which contemporary Western capitalist societies, institutions and minority social elites exert and maintain their status through the oppression and dispossession

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of the majority. Chapter  2 opens with a focus on some of the horrors that Almanac demands its readers witness: ‘Social (dis)orders’ such as capitalism, social privilege and the law. This opening chapter considers how Almanac’s recognition that we are in the ‘cancer stage of capitalism’ (McMurtry 1999) offers a graphic portrayal of the brutalities of the capitalist corporate system for the reader to witness. Silko’s violent and unforgettable images draw together the profoundly selfish and damaging activities of ‘vampire’ entrepreneurialism, of social privilege, and of the legal system, to demonstrate the ways in which all three systems are not only interlocked but mutually supporting. Equally, all three are shown to be complicit in the ongoing oppression and dispossession of the majority of their citizens. Originally written as a response to the excesses of the 1980s, Almanac can now clearly be read in the context of twenty-­firstcentury globalization, of the corporate greed that created not only the current global economic crisis (2008–) but also subsequent misery for millions worldwide, and of the increasingly visible environmental results of capitalist short-­termist profiteering. Chapter 3 focuses on patriarchy, gender and sexuality, and some of the ways in which power is maintained through institutional, and institutionalized, violence that is specifically gendered and sexualized. Almanac’s analysis of institutional violence exposes the ways in which patriarchal societies define and normalize notions of gender and sexuality, and the violence with which established definitions are policed. The text’s graphic assessment of the sex industry, and of sex and sexuality as forms of entertainment, demonstrates dominant contemporary structures of power and policing within capitalist patriarchy, and the ways in which the othering and abuse of female bodies is representative of a deep-­seated socio-­cultural misogyny. Silko’s controversial treatment of ‘homosexuality’ is explored in detail, to consider the extent to which the characters in question can be defined as ‘homosexual’, and the ways in which they are deployed as illustrations of patriarchy’s veneration of men and male relationships, and its abhorrence of women. Ultimately, this chapter explores the ways in which these characters demonstrate capitalist patriarchy’s inevitable ‘endgame’: the irrelevance and the eradication of the female, or femicide; and the ways in which misogynistic violence translates into a range of violences directed at the natural world, or ecocide. The final chapter of this first section assesses how the discourses of science, medicine and academia in Almanac are constructed to create and preserve profoundly hierarchical ‘discourses of difference’. Chapter  4 thus contemplates the ways in which powerful male-­dominated institutions, such as medicine, medical discourse and medical industries, support the ideologies and discriminative policies of patriarchal societies and legal systems. Almanac traces the ways in which scientific and medical discourse is put to use as a tool for oppression, drawing parallels with the misogyny and racial and social discrimination in wider patriarchal societies. Beginning with a consideration of the ways in which the new scientific method laid the foundations for the development of eugenics,

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this chapter explores the complicity of science in the kinds of violent control of human bodies that are evident in communal or national acts of misogyny or racism. These acts, by their very definition, demonstrate the ‘marking of difference’ via a systemic targeting of specific sections of the human communities or populations. This chapter considers how bodies of all kinds – human and non-­human – are ‘broken’ by the complex interactions of a ‘dissective’ scientific and medical discourse with the slow violences of systemic patriarchal capitalism. In particular, Almanac examines the ways in which academic discourses enforce and reinforce these established power relations and violent forms of control through their authority to create hierarchies, define ‘difference’ and construct ‘otherness’. The second part of this study, ‘Resistance and Revolucíon’, shifts the focus to analyse the ways in which Silko depicts alternatives: widespread and wide-­ ranging resistance, and textual revolution. Accordingly, all three chapters in this section explore distinct yet related forms of opposition, to trace the ways in which Almanac’s multitude of oppressed are allowed hope. Chapter 5 assesses how a recognition and deployment of Indigenous worldviews enables an understanding of the true nature of obligation. Taking Silko’s infamous assertion of the ‘disappearance of all things European’ as a starting point, this chapter considers how Indigenous cosmopolitics are essential to human survival in an increasingly damaged world. Beginning with a consideration of the role played by the textual almanac as one of the alternative cosmopolitical narratives of the text, this chapter also examines the textual representations and Indigenous interpretations of Karl Marx, to assess the ways in which new ways of thinking and the telling of new and more inclusive stories embody and transmit hope. This chapter also considers Almanac’s alternative ‘networks’: the ways in which the oppressive technologies explored in the last chapter can be hijacked, hacked and harnessed for the benefit of all rather than the few, and the ways in which such technologies can be used as a vehicle for the dissemination of narratives of resistance. And this chapter concludes by exploring how such narratives of resistance include our obligations to the Earth. Focusing on the textual environmental and ecological alliances, and considering the potential for collaboration with the eco-­warrior group ‘Green Vengeance’, this chapter assesses the ways in which the land – and our relationships to it – is representative of individual and collective freedoms and futures, and of hope. Chapter 6 explores Silko’s ‘Indian Connection’, to consider how, simply by offering viable paradigmatic alternatives to the damages caused by ‘all things European’, key examples of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives challenge the violent controls of the established patriarchal capitalist elites. Accordingly, this chapter assesses the ways in which a series of specific textual Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives demonstrate resistance through an erosion of European projections, coupled with a recognition of the indissoluble bonds of inter-­relatedness. This chapter explores the ways in which three specific textual characters – the re-­imagined historical figure of Geronimo, the ‘poet-­lawyer’

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Wilson Weasel Tail, and the prison-­reforming Barefoot Hopi – tell stories that are, in the tradition of Angelita’s ‘Marx’, not only emancipatory, but enable their textual listeners and extra-­textual readers to see ‘part’ of a bigger truth. Here, my argument also considers the physical space provided by the International Holistic Healers’ Convention as a site for cosmopolitical healing in its provision of ‘cures of all kinds’ (1991: 716), and a site in which alternative cosmopolitical narratives can be actively disseminated within the text. The final chapter of this second section addresses the most controversial and influential idea of the text: the relationships between textual and extra-­textual defiance. Here, my focus is upon the practical ways in which Almanac depicts the inevitability of cosmopolitical change through a consideration of two key components of Almanac’s demand for resistance and Revolucíon: the two textual ‘armies’; and the ways in which alternative Indigenous and non-Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are disseminated and deployed to challenge the primacy of the dominant narratives of patriarchal capitalism. This final chapter explores the kinds of inspiration upon which Almanac’s two armies draw, and how those forms of inspiration are disseminated, both as a recruiting tool and as an alternative to the dominant patriarchal capitalist narratives. Beginning with an assessment of the ways in which the violent controls of academic discourses such as history are challenged, overturned and rejected by the alternative narratives produced and disseminated by key representatives of Almanac’s two textual armies, this chapter then contemplates how inspiration works in terms of resistance narratives. Most importantly, this concluding chapter connects text to context to consider Almanac’s construction of resistance, its aims, and its possibilities within the context of specific twenty-­first-century extra-­textual forms of reinvigorated popular resistance that have emerged since the Arab Spring (2010). Thinking through how and why widely divergent peoples come together to identify and fight a common cause, this chapter ends with an assessment of the notion of obligation as the driving force of ‘Revolucíon’ in Almanac in the context of the 2011 international Occupy movement and the Indigenous Idle No More movement (2012–), which draws on the earlier (1994–) Zapatista movement. Otherwise, Revolution! concludes with an Afterword, to assess Almanac’s impact after twenty years of publication. Recognizing the ongoing events that Almanac continues to address, this Afterword avoids the very notion of conclusion. My final comments here consider the figure of the snake in Silko’s novel. Returning here to the very start of this study, to the words of Silko’s snake mural that offer a stark warning of ‘Revolucíon’, this Afterword situates Silko’s snake firmly within the extra-­textual context of the twenty-­first century, to emphasize Almanac’s commitment to Indigenous cosmopolitics as the only viable solution to contemporary global environmental problems. Chapter  8, therefore, reads Almanac’s textual and extra-­textual snakes as narratives of resistance told by the Earth itself.

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Notes 1 Leslie Marmon Silko, cited in ‘Listening to the Spirits: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko’, Ellen Arnold, Studies in American Indian Literatures (10:3, Fall 1998), 7. 2 Morrison dedicates her equally radical (yet Pulitzer prize-­winning) novel to the ‘Sixty Million and more’ (Beloved 1987; London: Vintage, 1997). 3 Population figures for the original Indigenous population of the Americas before European ‘contact’ remain a matter of much academic dispute. These range from as low as 18 million (Henry Dobyns 1983) to as high as 100 million (David Stannard 1992), with a potential consensus among many scholars of around 50–60 million (William Denevan 1976), for the period up until about 1900. For a recent overview of the scholarship, see Jeffrey Ostler, ‘Genocide and American Indian History’, American History: Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2015. 4 See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); John Skow, ‘A Review of Almanac of the Dead’, Time (9 December 1991), 86; Malcolm Jones Jr, ‘Reports from the Heartland: A Review of Almanac of the Dead’, Newsweek (18 December 1991), 84. 5 See reader reviews at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52385.Almanac_of_ the_Dead, and http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_15?url=search­alias%3Dstripbooks&field-­keywords=almanac+of+the+dead&sprefix=almanac+ of+the+%2Cstripbooks%2C160. Good Reads has a surprising 134 reviews, while Amazon has 10. 6 More recent critical readings demonstrate many similar concerns. Richard Rorty (1998) identifies Almanac as ‘a critical triumph’ and a ‘powerful novel’, but expresses unease at the way the text is ‘dominated by self-­disgust’, its societies ‘pervaded by hypocrisy and self-­deception’ (4, 6, 7). Walter Benn Michaels (2004) identifies Almanac as ‘enthusiastically multiculturalist’, but paradoxically also identifies Silko herself as ‘committed to a more or less straightforward ethnonationalism’, bluntly stating that she ‘prefers race and the appreciation of ethnic difference to class and the elimination of economic difference’ (21, 24). (The implication is that these are discrete and unrelated categories.) And, reading Almanac from a tribal perspective, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1996) also appreciates Silko’s ‘gallant effort’ and her ‘fearless assertion’ of Indigenous worldviews, but finds Almanac’s ‘embracing’ of multiculturalism and pan-­tribalism politically troubling, a ‘cosmopolitanism’ that effectively works against a focus on tribal ‘nationalism’ (78). 7 Silko, cited in Laura Coltelli, ‘Almanac of the Dead: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko’ (1992–3), reprinted in Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, ed. Ellen L. Arnold (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 132. 8 See the whole of chapter 6 in Adamson’s text for a nuanced reading of Ryan’s review. 9 The Bolivian law of 2010 was succeeded by the 2012 La Ley Marco de la Madre Tierra y Desarrollo Integral para Vivir Bien (Framework Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well). 10 See Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On; An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism’, MELUS (34, 2 (2009)), 12.

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11 The inscription on Silko’s mural at 930 North Stone Avenue, Tucson, Arizona. Both the Spanish inscription and its English translation are given in Silko’s collection of essays, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 149–51. Silko’s mural was subsequently recognized as one the best pieces of outdoor art of the year in Tuscon – see Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Leslie Marmon Silko: A Literary Companion, (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2011), 24. 12 See Thomas Irmer: ‘An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko’ (1999) . For detailed analyses of the policies of Arizona’s Governor Evan Mecham during this period, see Ronald J. Watkins, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Term and Trials of Former Governor Evan Mecham (New York: William Morrow, 1990); for Silko’s own account of her responses, see Yellow Woman. 13 See http://www.idlenomore.ca/. 14 For details of NDAPL cosmopolitics, see https://nodaplsolidarity.org/; for environmental concerns being raised over Trump’s corporate links and his attitude towards the environment, see http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/ president-­trump-global-­climate-change-­denial-environment/. 15 See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). As its title suggests, Coulthard’s analysis engages directly with Frantz Fanon’s seminal study of colonialism in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). 16 See the Environmental Protection Agency website, https://www.epa.gov/ environmentaljustice. 17 See, for instance, the publisher’s webpage for Almanac at: http://www. simonandschuster.com/books/The-Almanac-­of-the-Dead/Leslie-MarmonSilko/9781476737461

Part I O ppression and D ispossession

Chapter 2 S ocial ( dis ) orders : ‘ Vampire’ C apitalism , S ocial P rivilege and the L aw

Capitalism is absolutely irredeemable . . . I’m talking about laissez faire, trample-­people-into-­the-dirt, destroy-­the-earth capitalism.1 In an 1998 interview with Ellen Arnold, Silko asserted that ‘capitalism is absolutely irredeemable’, and so aptly demonstrated the central concept of her novel Almanac of the Dead (see epigraph above). In this interview, Silko’s subsequent definition of what she meant by ‘capitalism’ is quite clear: it is a range of global corporate ideologies that actively encourage, in fact depend upon, an absence of state regulation or oversight to enable and facilitate corporate strategies and practices that ‘trample-­people-into-­the-dirt’ and ‘destroy-­the-earth’ (Arnold 1998: 23–4). Importantly, both in this interview and within Almanac itself, people and Earth are inseparable and interrelated, sharing experiences not only of the ‘slow violence’ of the ideological practices of neo-­liberal late capitalism, but also the effects of those ideological practices. For my purposes here, the slow violence associated by Rob Nixon with the painful ‘long dyings’ experienced by the poor as a result of state and corporate environmental devastation is comparable with the lengthy processes and damaging consequences of fiscal policies such as ‘trickle-­down’ economics (2006–7: 14). As its name suggests, ‘trickle-­down’ economics relies upon and advocates a system whereby wealthy elites and corporate ‘big business’ are financially rewarded while the poor are both persuaded and required to ‘buy into’ the flagrant myth that this wealth will eventually ‘trickle down’ to benefit all of society. In Almanac, Silko engages with this ideology to demonstrate the real results of ‘trickle-­down’ economics: that the rich get ever richer while the poor are made ever poorer, via a slow and unrecognized, yet persistent and unrelenting oppression and dispossession. Like Nixon’s conceptualization of an environmental slow violence that works via a ‘delayed destruction that is dispelled across time and space’ (2011: 2), this equally attritional form of economic violence is not only difficult to see but, as a direct result of its relative invisibility, exceptionally difficult to challenge or combat. And this invisibility is crucial to the workings of economic slow violence: there is no one to blame for the poverty of the poor except the poor themselves. As a direct result, the poor can be ‘punished’ for their poverty by both

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state and state policies that imply that poverty is the result of individual financial mismanagement. As David McNally commented, ‘[t]o be desperately poor . . . [is] to be insubordinate, to refuse to adapt to the market-­economy’ (2012: 52). Accordingly, corporate interests in the era of neo-­liberal late capitalism can very effectively distance themselves from the direct results of their ideologies and practices, whereby elites are ever further detached from the increasing masses of poor and dispossessed and their concerns. And the success of this moralizing narrative that demonizes the poor can be traced, as Shawn Cassiman has argued, in the speed and enthusiasm with which the majority of the American population have become increasingly ‘eager to disassociate themselves’ from the poor so as to ‘align themselves with the dominant narrative’ and so avoid any economic ‘punishment’ (2007: 58). Importantly, the processes of economic slow violence are evident in the terminology that Silko employs in the Arnold interview to describe the workings of late capitalism: to ‘trample’ is to cause damage and pain, to treat the bodies and emotions of others as if they were unimportant or worthless, to ‘inflict injury or destruction, especially contemptuously or ruthlessly’. And the relatedness of people and Earth is equally evident in Silko’s words: if, as Silko asserts, capitalism tramples people into the dirt, then it does so at the expense of the Earth; if, conversely, the Earth is damaged as a result of capitalist practices, then this causes equal destruction for people and communities. When we consider Silko’s statement within Glenn Sean Coutlhard’s conceptualization of grounded normativity, then it can be clearly demonstrated that Silko depicts the relationship between people and land in Almanac as one of ‘reciprocal relations and obligations’ that are both experiential and educational (Coulthard 2014: 23, original emphasis). The key term here, both for Coulthard’s theory and for the politics and plotlines of Almanac itself, is ‘obligation’: humans have both a moral and/or legal ‘duty’ to the Earth that automatically entails respect, and a ‘responsibility’ that necessitates we demonstrate our reliability and trustworthiness within this relationship. Significantly, the definition of ‘obligation’ denotes a promise, acknowledgement, agreement or contract that is both legally and morally binding. As I will discuss in the later chapters of this study that explore the workings of resistance in Almanac, it is the requirement that we meet our obligations – to each other and to the Earth – that is the driving force of ‘Revolucíon’ in Silko’s novel. The correct relationship between humans and Earth, then, is one of mutual respect, support and obligation: a living with and for the land that engages directly with the workings and epistemologies of Indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics. As a result, Almanac’s emphasis upon human–Earth interconnectivity, and the likely results when that interconnectivity is disrupted or denied, can very productively be read in the contexts of grounded normativity, and of both economic and environmental slow violence. Silko’s assertion that ‘capitalism is absolutely irredeemable’ is, therefore, central to our understanding of Almanac’s exploration of a range of influential social orders or, more accurately, social disorders, including ‘vampire’ capitalism,

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social privilege and the law. It is equally central to our understanding of the ways in which those influential social disorders that impact upon the Earth and its human and non-­human inhabitants are depicted in Silko’s novel. Almanac’s interest is in the ways in which the contemporary capitalist system is predicated upon, and perhaps cannot fully function without, large-­scale exploitation and oppression. Importantly, Almanac also engages with the most significant and far-­ reaching economic and political developments of the 1980s (the time of its composition), and so anticipates the resulting developments of more recent years: namely the inexorable neo-­liberal drive towards globalization and multinational capital, and the ongoing attempts to privatize, commodify and ‘corporatize’ human societies on a global scale. In this context, one of Almanac’s fundamental aims is to trace the connections between a series of ostensibly disconnected yet enormously powerful economic, socio-­political entities, such as capitalism, social privilege and the law; and to explore the ways in which those entities mutually support one another in order to further concentrate and consolidate their own positions. Above all, Almanac’s goal is to show the effects of those connections and actions: upon human bodies and upon the natural world. In considering Almanac retrospectively, one could argue that its focus not only anticipates the discourses of twenty-­first-century anti-­capitalist and anti-­ globalization movements, but also demonstrates how the vested interests of the elite are privileged over those of the majority. In other words, to use recognized popular twenty-­first-century terminology, how the 1 per cent benefit at the direct expense of the 99 per cent. In this context, Almanac’s discussion of the inter-­ relationships of capitalism, social privilege and the law can be interpreted as a consideration of the very nature of democracy, its role in everyday life, and its persistent and pernicious erosion by vested financial, political and social interests. In its emphasis upon ‘Revolucíon’ of all kinds, Almanac demands that we keep firmly in mind the origins and true meanings of democracy: the ‘people power’ that derives from the ‘strength’ or ‘rule’ of the ‘common people’ is not elite but profoundly, inarguably and inescapably popular. And we need to keep firmly in mind the fact that democracy itself is inextricably linked to the natural world: as the environmental writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams has argued, not only is ‘the health of the environment . . . [to be] seen as the wealth of our communities’, but it also ‘provides justice for all living things – plants, animals, rocks, and rivers, as well as human beings’. For Williams, the Earth is therefore an ‘open space of democracy’ where a ‘life in association, not a life independent, is the democratic ideal’ (2004: 8, 9, 80). In this context, the ‘Revolucíon’ that Silko’s novel demands is, therefore, as Virginia Kennedy has argued, one that is emphatically ‘systemic’ (2015: 99); where ‘the disappearance of all things European’ that is predicted in Silko’s map legend can be read within the context of vampire capitalism as an overturning of the oppressive and exploitative worldviews that refuse to recognize the inter-­relationships between humans, or between humans and the Earth. Through violent and graphic imagery, Almanac not only exposes the exclusionary workings of contemporary late capitalist socio-­political systems,

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but also shows the ways that a variety of institutions are complicit in the ongoing oppression and dispossession of the majority of their citizens and natural environments. As Rambo Roy, a ‘resistance’ leader with Almanac’s Army of the Homeless, bluntly comments, ‘the United States faced a far greater threat . . . government and police owned by the fat cats. . . . [while] women and children [went] hungry, and [were] sleeping on the streets. This was not democracy’ (1991: 393, emphasis added). Almanac thus very visibly demonstrates David Harvey’s contention that contemporary capitalism and neo-­liberalism are ‘the “new” imperialism’ that operates on the basis of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2004: 63–87). Accordingly, Almanac’s plotlines show the ways in which neo-­ liberal capitalist practices operate via an economics of slow violence to deny any sense of grounded normativity, with the express aim of refuting any kind of obligation to either human beings or the Earth.

The slow violence of ‘vampire’ capitalism Silko’s initial impetus for Almanac was the cultural sea change of the 1980s in America, when profound moral, socio-­political transformations emerged as a result of equally profound changes in American economic cultures. In particular, Almanac responds to the concentration of unimaginable power in financial centres, a new and compelling political emphasis in many Western countries upon privatization, and a reduction in long-­established and accepted state obligations for the welfare of their citizens. An overview of the economic changes of this time is thus essential for our full understanding of Silko’s novel, including the ways in which these profound extra-­textual socio-­political, economic and cultural changes fed into the transformation of Silko’s fictional concept of ‘witchery’, from the decidedly local force of oppression evident in her first novel Ceremony (1977) into its reconfiguration, within Almanac, as the global and international processes and effects of ‘vampire capitalism’. In Ceremony, the ‘Destroyers’ who manipulate the oppressive forces of ‘witchery’ clearly embody the type of thinking that denies any notion of relatedness, especially between human and non-­human communities, and between humans and the Earth. Silko bluntly states that ‘They see no life’, ‘[t]he world is a dead thing for them’ and, as a direct result, they are both destructive and self-­ destructive: ‘[t]hey fear the world./They destroy what they fear/They fear themselves’ (1997: 135). In her earlier novel, then, Silko had made it clear just what the dangers of this deliberate refusal to recognize our relatedness were: we destroy what we fear. However, the far-­reaching changes of the 1980s, facilitated in large part by the deregulation of economic markets, and by the subsequent enrichment of a small elite at the expense of the many, acted to transform Ceremony’s concept of the ‘witchery’ into Almanac’s notion of ‘vampire capitalism’, that oppresses human and non-­human alike because it is driven by ‘the greedy destroyers of the land’ (1991: 156). To trace the nature of, and

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reasons for, this transformation, we need to consider Almanac more fully within its extra-­textual cultural context. The presidential election success of Ronald Reagan in 1980 saw the introduction and deployment of an internationally influential laissez-­faire economic policy subsequently labelled ‘Reaganomics’, that became firmly established during both terms of Reagan’s presidency. The principles of Reaganomics were attractively simple: advocating a traditional laissez-­faire philosophy which demanded an exceptionally light governmental touch, Reagan emphasized broad cuts in income and capital gains tax, alongside a championing of ‘free’ markets and ‘free’ trade. Most importantly, in the context of Almanac’s depiction of ‘trample-­people-into-­the-dirt’ and ‘destroy-­the-Earth’ capitalist practices, the ideology of Reaganomics favoured tax breaks for social elites and corporate interests, while asserting that the benefits of this would eventually ‘trickle down’ to the advantage of all members of society. This invariably failed to happen, but what did happen, as David Harvey has argued, was that neo-­liberalization emerged as ‘a political project’ to ‘re-­establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’ (2005: 19). Additionally, the ‘light touch’ demanded by such laissez-­faire policies fed into an alarming lack of governmental regulation of corporations and their activities. The economic effect was, Paul Krugman argued, twofold: the deregulation drive ‘broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence’, which in turn facilitated both a vast ‘rise in private debt’ and ‘a radical change in American [popular] behaviour’ (2009) that continues to have an effect in the twenty-­first century, including the role(s) it played in the two profoundly destructive global financial ‘crashes’ of 1987 and 2008. The political effect was even more alarming: as Noam Chomsky has argued, the emphasis on ‘free trade’ created a proliferation of international agreements that further disempowered the majority of global citizens by ‘transfer[ring] decision making about people’s lives and aspirations into the hands of private tyrannies that operate in secret and without public supervision or control’ (1999: 132–3). The result, according to Chomsky, was an ‘undermining [of] democracy’: the notion of government by the people and for the people (1999: 132–3). In the context of Almanac, it is crucial to note that this extra-­textual transfer of power to private corporate interests applied equally to decisions that would be made about the relationships between local communities and their environments; and so, more widely, about human relationships to the Earth. But what marked the decade of Reagan’s presidency as a potential Zeitgeist, and what provoked Silko’s powerful fictional response, was the ability of the American administration to combine economic sea changes with moral sea changes, and the international influence of this combination. As David Stoesz and Howard Jacob Karger have argued, during Reagan’s presidency a ‘liberal orientation to welfare reform’ that had held sway since the New Deal era was irreversibly ‘eclipsed by a . . . shift in ideology brought about by significant changes in the social, political, and economic sectors of American society’

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(1990: 141). Moreover, as Graham Thompson has noted, Reagan himself ‘assume[d] . . . synecdochic power’ during the 1980s, while Reaganomics as a policy not only had ‘a crusading zeal that emphasized regeneration and reinvention [that] spoke to a perceived sense of decline and responded with a vision of a “miracle” ’ it was also imbued with wider values: ‘not just an economic vision but a moral vision too’ (2006: 4, 8, emphasis added). Drawing on the commanding rhetoric of an increasingly powerful New Christian Right in the USA, the Reagan administration’s own brand of influential ideological discourse blended the economic with the moral and the political with the personal, to assert the entitlement and enrichment of the few over the rights and impoverishment of the many. In doing so, these ideological state discourses not only reduced long-­established and accepted state obligations to the welfare of their citizens and to the Earth, but also actively refuted those obligations. In the textual world of Almanac, the results of this extra-­textual over-­turning of deep-­seated notions of obligation are depicted as an irresistible and influential denial of the mutual relationships between humans, and of the inter-­ relationships between humans and the natural world. Within Almanac, this represents a key form of slow violence that rejects and negates the values and benefits of any sense of grounded normativity. Importantly, it is the seismic nature of the changes in global financial practices in the 1980s to which Almanac responds, reflecting the sudden shifts in corporate strategies to capitalize upon unexpected and exceptionally rapid technological developments and advances,2 particularly in the digital technologies, that revolutionized global economics and trading, and accelerated the proliferation of multinational capital interests. Importantly, these changes in financial practices incorporated significant ideological and moral changes which were to filter through to individuals and communities more widely, often with highly detrimental consequences. It is, therefore, into highly complex socio-­political and economic territories that Almanac plunges, providing a savage and biting critical commentary on, and denouncement of, the vampiric economic and moral transformation of American culture in the 1980s, and the ongoing legacies for humans and the natural world. Since Silko spent the entire decade writing Almanac, it is perhaps unsurprising that it is such a comprehensive analysis. Indeed, the full range of those affected, and infected, by vampire capitalism is on inescapable display within the text, alongside almost incomprehensible examples of the individual and group greed demanded by ‘vampire capitalism’, from overt entrepreneurial practitioners and covert elite beneficiaries, to the impact of capitalism’s ideological demands on social and environmental structures more widely. And Silko carefully traces and exposes the complicity of capitalism’s powerful bedfellows, social privilege and the law. What is profound in the text is how Faustian the pact with capitalism is; how, once the pact is made, there are few lengths to which those in thrall to ‘the system’ will not go for the promise of more profit or more power. How, most problematically, to achieve ‘success’

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within ‘the system’, an individual must eschew that which makes us most human: love. In this context, Almanac is an intriguing and pertinent comment on the wide-­ranging excesses of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, that traces the instinctive ‘progress’ of greed from ‘I want’ to ‘I am entitled to’ (Kaplan 1991: 511). It is no coincidence that one of the most successful and powerful films of this period, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), had at its centre the charismatic yet vampiric corporate entrepreneur Gordon Gekko, whose most memorable and infamous scene was centred upon a celebration of capitalist ideology: ‘Greed . . . is good. Greed is right. Greed works.’ Importantly, Gekko’s speech both normalized and naturalized capitalist greed within 1980s America, presenting it not only as an unassailable ‘truth’ of human nature but also an aspiration to be realized. And Almanac responds directly to this emergent ideology, demonstrating the links between greed and selfishness, and between selfishness and self-­love; and showing the ways that greed can only succeed via a denial of both relatedness and obligation. As Almanac’s socially elite self-­styled ‘aristocrat’ Beaufrey comments, ‘[h]e had always loved himself. . . . His selfishness gave him great satisfaction’ (1991: 533). Almanac provides vivid evidence that ‘capitalism is absolutely irredeemable’, graphically demonstrating Karl Marx’s contention that ‘capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood . . .’ (1990: 926). Moreover, Almanac engages directly and most literally with notions of what Silko terms ‘vampire capitalism’ (1991: 312): through the deliberate deployment of the term as a textual sub-­title; through the assertion that Marx (whose ideas and writings are discussed at length in the novel3) himself had ‘caught the capitalists . . . with bloody hands’ (1991: 312); and through demonstrations of capitalism’s ability to constantly reinvent and transform itself in order not simply to survive but to continually thrive via rabid and parasitic economic and corporate practices. Silko’s novel, therefore, accurately anticipates the extra-­ textual consolidation and internationalization of Reagonomics’ laissez-­faire principles in the twenty-­first century via ‘market fundamentalism’ that, as the name suggests, has continued to promote an unshakeable belief in the power of ‘trickle-­down’ economics to produce beneficial economic and social results, and has continued to deny any contradictory evidence.4 Even more importantly, Almanac also anticipated one of market fundamentalism’s extra-­textual consequences: the kinds of popular socio-­political discontent that began to emanate from the anti-­capitalism/anti-­globalization movement(s), or global justice movements, in the last decades of the twentieth century. Almanac’s ‘prescience’ regarding extra-­textual popular protest can also be read in the context of more recent popular contestations of elite power and dominance, which themselves demonstrate the ways in which such forms of popular protest are an extension of the kinds of historical and contemporary resistance depicted within Silko’s text to show that ‘[t]he Indian wars have never ended in the Americas’ (1991: map legend). It is in this context that we as readers can reconsider recent popular acts of resistance – such as the internationally

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influential Occupy movement (2011–) that decried the continued ruthless exploitation of the majority (99 per cent) of the world’s human populations by a tiny elite (1 per cent); or the ways in which that oppression was extended by the Indigenous Idle No More movement (2012–) which emphasized a ‘grounded normativity’ by exposing the need to recognize human and non-­human inter-­ relatedness in the battle for social and economic justice – as the latest in a long history of ‘Revolucíon’ as detailed in Silko’s novel.5 Like the keepers of the fictional almanac within Silko’s text, we as readers thus become what Daria Donnelly has identified as ‘unauthorized marginal storytellers’ (1999: 248), encouraged to add our own twenty-­first-century ‘scribbles and scratches’ to Almanac’s margins to maintain and retain its cultural and political relevance for our own times (Silko 1991: 570). Drawing on Karl Marx’s most famous assertion that ‘[c]apital is dead labour that, vampire-­like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (2010: 115), Almanac traces and exposes the parasitical nature of contemporary capitalist economic exchange of every kind. In the worlds of Almanac, capitalists and ‘entrepreneurs’ are, like Marx’s vampire, living off the labour, and even off the life-­blood, of others. Almanac’s vampire capitalism literally transforms bodies and body parts into the commodities that Marx discusses in his three-­volume Das Kapital (1867, 1893, 1894), as Silko directly comments on Marx’s analysis of nineteenth-­century industrial employment practices, that are described in Almanac as ‘machines that consumed . . . [the] limbs and . . . lives’, of a workforce that had been purposefully ‘deformed’ so as ‘to fit inside factory machinery’ before being reduced to ‘corpses . . . worked to death’, all designed to ‘make a rich man richer’ (1991: 312). This is nowhere more evident than in the actions of the business ‘entrepreneurs’ of Silko’s text, who seek to profit from the losses and sufferings of others. These include, among others, Menardo, the owner of the highly successful Universal Insurance company in Mexico; the former Mafia boss and professional assassin Max Blue and his realtor wife Leah; the paraplegic Trigg, owner of the lucrative medical corporation Bio-Materials Inc.; and the shadowy ‘travel agent’ transporting illegal yet elite immigrants across the US–Mexico border via ‘Mario’s Luxury Bus Tours’ (1991: 666). Significantly, what marks each and every example is their absolute and unwavering commitment to, and enactment of, the ‘greed creed’ of vampire capitalism, its extension of social inequalities, and its identification of entire social groups as deserving of exploitation and oppression. As Max Blue pertinently comments, the term ‘legitimate business’ ‘only meant no firearms were used’ (1991: 379). All, equally, represent different facets of the workings of global capital, and the everyday impact of market forces upon human and non-­human lives. What is significant about the majority of these examples is that most have something personal to prove that drives their ruthless and relentless pursuit of wealth; all privilege the individual at the expense of communities more widely; and none have any understanding of, or even any desire to understand, the concepts of responsibility or obligation.

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Indeed, all of Almanac’s vampire capitalists visibly and demonstrably reject and negate any suggestion that we meet our obligations to one another or to the Earth, setting the scene for Silko’s consideration of the necessity of ‘Revolucíon’ within the text. With the exception of the unidentifiable ‘Mario’, all are therefore presented as damaged and dangerously damaging individuals; all are emotionally ‘dead’; ultimately unloving and unloved. It soon becomes evident that, to achieve business success, Almanac’s capitalists must eliminate the human; they must, like the vampire, become inhuman. This, Almanac seems to suggest, is a prerequisite for business success in the era of late capitalism, neo-­ liberalism and globalization because it is the era when ‘vampire capitalism’ holds sway: it is ‘the reign of the Death-Eye Dog’, during which formerly human beings are tempted to become inhuman, ‘obsessed with hungers and impulses commonly seen in wild dogs’ (1991: 251). Most significantly, this vampiric worldview is dangerous because it will not be denied, because it declares itself to be a ‘truth self-­evident’, because – like the figure of the vampire itself – it is not only utterly and excessively consuming, but also highly contagious. As Nicola Nixon has commented, the drive of the vampire is to ‘infect . . . irrevocably’ (1997: 117). The highly infectious ‘self-­ evident truths’ of capitalism argue that capitalist ideology is synonymous with democracy; and that there are no longer any feasible alternative socio-­political visions. As Mark Fisher has noted, ‘not only is capitalism [presented as] the only viable political and economic system . . . it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (2009: 2). If, as McNally pointed out, the slow violence of capitalism has ‘become as invisible as the air we breathe’, then it has also become equally essential (2012: 15). Therefore, while capitalism ostensibly provides limitless possibilities, those possibilities are nonetheless expressly limited within the capitalist system itself, exposing the amorality of relentless and remorseless accumulation. Indeed, it is this combination of amorality with insatiable accumulation that marks the vampire’s ongoing suitability as a metaphor for capitalism. In Franco Moretti’s influential Marxist reading (also from the Reagan era), the vampire is therefore ‘a ruthless proprietor’ with ‘accumulation . . . inherent in his nature’ (1983: 83, 91). Accordingly, Nicola Nixon drew direct parallels with Reagan’s America, and with the specific ‘brand’ of Reaganomics in her own analysis of vampires and capitalism in the 1980s, asking ‘should we find it so strange that the powerful, amoral, single-­minded individualism characteristic of the vampire, who profits by and capitalizes on the weakness of vulnerability of others, should not, in fact, represent the truly demonic or evil in Reaganite America?’ (1997: 121). It is specifically in this context of the popularity of the ‘redeemable’ vampire in 1980s American popular culture that we can read Almanac’s reconsideration of vampiric capitalist ideology and its inhuman insistence on ‘profit over people’ (Chomsky 1999). Almanac’s reconsideration of the vampire thus allows a reconsideration of the ideological and moral configuration of ‘greed as good’ within Reagan’s

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America. Echoing, instead, critical readings of the vampire as a trope for greed, Almanac rejects the normalization of greed in cultural examples such as the speech of Gekko in Wall Street, instead redefining greed as inhuman and unnatural. If, as Harvey A. Kaplan has commented, greed is itself ‘represented psychoanalytically by the language of orality: devouring, sucking, biting’ (1991: 505), then this in Silko’s novel is inseparable from the actions of vampire capitalism. The very definition of greed identifies an insatiability that derives from a ‘selfish and excessive desire for more than is needed’, and this inbuilt selfishness results, as Kaplan further commented, in ‘an almost wanton disregard for the feelings of others’ (1991: 505). And this wanton disregard, coupled with an indisputable sense of self-­worth, is ever-­evident in the attitudes of Almanac’s vampire capitalists: it is no coincidence that Trigg comments that ‘I see myself as being superior to the others. I am better than all of them’, or that, for Beaufrey, ‘others did not fully exist – they were only ideas that flitted across his consciousness then disappeared’ (1991: 386, 533). Shared by Almanac’s other vampire capitalists, this deliberately skewed evaluation of human value – some people (the entrepreneurs) are valuable, while others (the proletariat) are not – both echoes Marx’s critique of capitalism and exposes the ways in which vampire capitalism works within the text, and within the extra-­textual context of Reagan’s America more widely. The successful social absorption of an ethos, if not a creed, of greed in 1980s America therefore seems to speak directly to the seductive and contagious power of vampire capital as represented in Silko’s text. That capitalist greed has, in an increasingly secular world, itself begun to take the place of faith and to be worshipped, is evident in Kaplan’s interpretation of Gekko’s infamous speech as ‘a sermon’ that ‘portray[s] greed as a . . . noble human emotion that can save us all’ (1991: 506). For Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey, ‘[g]reed, corporatism and consumerism have become the sacred trinity of our times’ (2010: 721); and the wide acceptance of the need and the desirability of greed both enabled and encouraged the increasing polarization of wealth in the United States; while the growing wealth of the elites, instead of provoking a socio-­political backlash, became a symbol of individual success that was to be admired and emulated. The seductive promise of vampire capital is that elite social privilege is open to all, provided enough wealth (and enough possessions to demonstrate that wealth) is accumulated. Greed, it seems, is not only desirable but essential to human salvation in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries.

Almanac’s ‘vampire’ capitalists Accordingly, Almanac’s vampire capitalists demonstrate a ‘wanton disregard’ of others that is predicated upon, and emerges from, a desire to exploit; and which also depends upon a willingness to dehumanize other human beings. It is no coincidence that the vampire capitalists of Silko’s text demonstrate inhumanity

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and lovelessness; or that they willingly and openly refute any notion of obligation, either to their fellow humans or to the Earth itself. As Janet St Clair has argued, Almanac’s vampire capitalists demonstrate a ‘love of death’ that is inseparable from, even contingent upon, a ‘death of love’ (1996). And so, all such characters also consistently devalue human and non-­human life while celebrating their own unique sense of self-­worth. Importantly, the invisible operations of vampire capitalism are exposed in Silko’s novel, highlighting vampire capitalism’s ‘transformation of human flesh and blood into raw materials for the manic machinery of accumulation’ (McNally 2012: 115). Almanac’s most literal vampire capitalist is Trigg, who deals in – and profits from – human blood, tissue and organs, successfully transforming them into marketable commodities via his business venture Bio-Materials Inc. In the tradition of a vampire capitalism that relies on dissociative language to enable moral disengagement, the naming of Trigg’s company deliberately (and deceitfully) conceals its reliance upon the purely biological: the human blood, tissue and organs that are ‘harvested’ from ‘donors’ as ‘for-­profit’ commodities. While Trigg’s venture begins, suitably, solely with blood products, he finds he is mesmerized by ‘the price quotes’ for, and so the profits from and exchange-­ value of, ‘human corneas, and cadaver skin’,6 and ‘fetal-­brain matter, human kidneys, hearts and lungs’ (1991: 389, 398). Trigg’s awareness that the primary aim of vampire capitalism is an ever-­increasing and infinite profit drives his desire to find an equally infinite supply of his ‘product’, to attract and keep attracting the ‘donors’ who will give and keep giving. For the vampire capitalist, the answer is alarmingly simple. Like the proletariat who have no choice but to submit to both the laws of capital and the physical abuses of the industrial system in Marx’s analysis, Trigg’s targeted victims are also those with no other choice: the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, the disenfranchised, the alcoholics and addicts. Accordingly, Trigg aims to ‘exploit’ areas of high unemployment for recruiting suitable donors (1991: 389). Taking advantage of rising local unemployment levels directly resulting from the sacking of labour activists, Trigg’s actions provide an example of the kinds of ‘punishment’ meted out by vampire capitalism to keep the poor firmly in their place. Taking Marx’s vision of labour alienation to its limits, and demonstrating the dehumanizing effects of the capitalist system, Trigg ‘bleeds’ his victims because they are merely ‘alleged human beings, the filth and scum’ who ‘get paid good money for lying with a needle in their arms’ (1991: 386, emphasis added). Like the workers physically transformed by their labour in Marx’s analysis, Trigg’s victims are dispensable, faceless vermin – ‘human debris. Human refuse’ (1991: 444) – whose only reason for existence is to be exploited (i.e. put to good use) by their social and economic superiors. Gesturing towards the extra-­textual attitude of the Reagan administration towards the poor, Silko’s depiction of Trigg’s treatment of his ‘donors’ can be read as a form of ‘punishment’ meted out to those whose very poverty marks their insubordination within the capitalist system.

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Accordingly, Trigg sees his donors only in terms of their value as a commodity, eventually taking his ‘production process’ a step further by targeting hitchhikers, whom he quite literally bleeds to death, ‘pint by pint’ (1991: 444). Choosing ‘transients’ whom no one will miss, Trigg emulates the eroticized vampire by distracting his male victims with fellatio as they slowly die, paying ‘extra if the victim agreed’ to his death (1991: 444). And his contempt for human life is fully displayed: ‘Trigg blames the homeless men. . . . blames them for being easy prey. . . . . They got a favour from him. To go out taking head from him. He doubted few of them could hope for a better death’ (1991: 444). For Trigg, and by extension for the biomedical industries with whom he has ‘illegal’ sales deals, the poor and dispossessed are worth no more than the sum of their available body parts; they are simply ‘products’ that are ripe for ‘harvesting’ (1991: 443, 444). Vampire capitalism in Silko’s novel is thus truly a ‘corpse economy’, and explicit links can be detected between the workings of international capital and business practices in the late twentieth century and illegal ‘grave robbing’ in the late eighteenth century, which saw the emergence of a rapacious ‘market’ for human corpses for medical/anatomical research and dissection (McNally 2012: 52). Such examples demonstrate the ways in which vampire capitalism ensures that, as McNally has argued, ‘human bodies, increasingly commodified in life, assum[e] in death the status of commodities pure and simple’ (2012: 52). Trigg is therefore clearly cast not simply as a ruthless vampire capitalist, but also as a body-­snatcher, a move that acts to expose both the illegalities of his ‘trade’ and also the exploitation and oppression of those upon whom he preys; and which has clear connections to the far-­ reaching international operations of Beaufrey and Serlo that are discussed in the next section, and more fully in Chapter 3. The nature of Trigg’s exploitation and oppression is emphasized by the extension of his business activities to acquire more property for more donor centres. Trigg’s engagement with the oppressive business practices of vampire capitalism is shown to both facilitate and perpetuate existing socio-­economic and racial ‘categories’ and attitudes. Here, as elsewhere, Almanac draws directly upon the ‘real-­world’ social and economic policies of the Reagan era, with Trigg’s ‘medical’ business emulating and reflecting the ways in which the Reagan administration’s social policies acted, as Shawn Cassiman has suggested, to deliberately ‘medicaliz[e]’ poverty so as to depict it as a form of curable and, more importantly, preventable, disease (2007: 57). In this way, the Reagan administration ensured that popular discussions and perceptions of poverty revolved around a ‘dependency narrative’ where those in receipt of welfare, by definition the very poorest in society, were identified – in the terminology of the nineteenth century – as undeserving: ‘deviant’ and ‘pathological’ (Cassiman 2007: 57). This extra-­textual context is directly reflected in Silko’s text, notably in Trigg’s business expansion, which requires the ‘rehabilitat[ion]’ of entire neighbourhoods whose poverty is specifically marked by ethnicity and race. Accordingly, Trigg declares that he has to contend with the ‘brown floaters’, the

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‘Mexicans and blacks’ who could ‘drift up from the bottom of the cesspool’ to ‘stink up and ruin’ all of Trigg’s own ‘good work’ (1991: 387). While it is financially profitable to drive ‘property prices down’, and this has previously been done by moving the socially and racially ‘undesirable’ into a neighbourhood, Trigg finds legal strategies that eliminate the need to deal directly with those who are ‘undesirable’. So, the legal ‘re-­zon[ing]’ of property allows the strategic placement of ‘blood plasma donor centers’ that ‘busted neighbourhoods’ and killed communities from within, enabling Trigg to ‘bu[y] down-­town block by shabby block’ and profit from the losses of others (1991: 379). Indeed, Trigg’s ruthless lack of compassion and his determination to exploit others is even more evident in his dealings with the property developer Leah Blue, with whom he pursues a sexual relationship in the hope that they can merge and diversify their business interests. Aiming to develop a ‘detox and addiction treatment hospital’, Trigg plans to take advantage of the ‘millions and millions to be made from treatments for people addicted to alcohol and other drugs’ (1991: 382). Yet Leah Blue’s associations with Trigg – they are both lovers and business partners – derives from her own ruthless drive for profit and for ‘resources’ to be exploited. Recognizing that Trigg’s responsibility for his own ‘confinement’ (as he sees it) to a wheelchair due to a drink-­driving accident, and so his desire to succeed as a businessman, stems entirely from his need to finance the ‘breakthrough technology’ that will allow him to walk again (1991: 386), Leah ruthlessly exploits Trigg’s fears, self-­absorption and emotional detachment. As a result, Leah expands Trigg’s potentially highly lucrative concept for exploiting the profitable ‘health’ market by using Trigg himself as an exploitable resource in her plans for the development of ‘the first luxury complex for the handicapped and addicted’. Here, full advantage can be taken of any ‘soft money’ available from the government in the form of ‘preferential loans for housing the disabled’, and Leah has the option, at a later stage, of jettisoning Trigg from the deal to ensure that she can ‘get first crack’ at the market herself (1991: 382, 381). Leah’s business deals quite clearly have seductive vampiric qualities, with Leah herself shown to be addicted to the ‘real rush’ that each and every successful deal brings and whose contagious nature makes ‘the killer shine’ in her eyes (1991: 359, 360). What becomes even clearer is that the Almanac’s vampire capitalists will exploit anything and anyone, including each other: in the business world of Silko’s novel, there is no such thing as obligation, and nothing is sacred. Importantly, it is via Leah Blue and her ‘Blue Water Investment Corporation’ that Almanac demonstrates how the kinds of slow violence directed by vampire capitalism at human beings is inseparable from the kinds of slow violence also directed at the natural world. Equally importantly, what is also shown are the ways in which destruction of the natural world is enabled by, and even predicated upon, an absence of human love. This absence of obligation of any kind, this emotional detachment, this lovelessness, is a pre-­requisite and even a requirement of vampire capitalism. It is no coincidence that all of Almanac’s

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vampire capitalists are detached and loveless individuals from dysfunctional family backgrounds, suggesting the key role played by inherited social values, especially amongst socially and economically elite groups. Accordingly, Trigg is raised by ‘corporate lawyers and alcoholics’, and his casual lack of concern for the well-­being of others is linked to his own sexualized sadism: he states clearly that it is the emotional pain of others that ‘get[s] my dick hard’ (1991: 384, 385). Likewise, Menardo despises and conceals the ‘horrible discovery’ of his Indigenous ancestry and shows only relief when its sole evidence – his Indigenous grandfather – ‘had been buried’ (1991: 259); similarly, the socially elite Beaufrey has no reaction to the fact that his mother ‘never wanted children because of the nuisance’, commenting that ‘[h]e felt indifferent towards his mother and father’ because ‘[t]hey did not matter’ (1991: 536, 533); the Colombian ‘aristocrat’ Serlo is sexually abused and exploited by his grandfather after his parents’ divorce because ‘neither had wanted him’ enough to keep him safe (1991: 546); and Leah also ruthlessly exploits the emotions of her own young sons to achieve the best possible business deals (1991: 359). All of these characters demonstrate oppressive cruelty and a sociopathic desire to exploit and hurt others that exposes their own self-­absorption and selfishness, their willingness to embrace of the greed creed of vampire capitalism. Like Trigg, Leah uses physical sexual acts both as a form of control and to further her own business ventures. Leah derives sexual satisfaction from outmanoeuvring her lovers/business rivals and making maximum profit. Leah’s choice of sexual partners is almost entirely for financial gain, and she actively pursues any man who can give her a business advantage, whether knowingly or unwittingly. This is crucial, since Leah’s most significant and most exploitative business project, the ‘city of the twenty-­first century, Venice, Arizona’ (1991: 374), has numerous ‘obstacles’ that are legal and environmental, not to mention moral and ethical. To build her ‘dream’, therefore, Leah will have to challenge and defeat local tribal water rights protected by law, and – even more problematically in logistical terms – also overcome the ecological limits of the land evident in the scarcity of water in the desert. While Leah’s ‘determination’ to succeed in business drives her interpretation of obstacles as challenges that will eventually be conquered as part of ‘the rush’ of vampire capitalism, she is nonetheless blind to the possibility that an obstacle might be genuinely insurmountable or even legitimate. In this context, Venice, Arizona, is one of Almanac’s most pertinent examples of ‘trample-­people-into-­the-dirt, destroy-­the-Earth capitalism’. Here, an exploitation of the land is directly related to the exploitation of human beings; any sense of reciprocal relations and obligations is negated; and, via the threats to the Earth, democracy itself comes under threat. In Leah’s vision of slow violence, there is quite simply no grounded normativity. Leah plans ‘lake after lake, and . . . custom-­built neighbourhoods linked by quaint waterways’ to evoke Venetian-­style canals (1991: 375), aiming to transform a desert landscape ill-­suited to support such excess. As Marc Reisner commented in his classic study of the American Southwest, Cadillac Desert, ‘millions’ have been attracted

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to settle such desert regions ‘where nature, left alone, would have countenanced thousands at best’ (1993: 2). Yet, for Leah, fixated as she is on profit and financial gain, her plans for a water city in the desert make perfect business sense: ‘[m]arket research had repeatedly found new arrivals in the desert were reassured by the splash of water’, and the ‘water gimmick’ had already been proved to work for ‘the dumb shits’ who bought into such developments (1991: 375, 374–5). Leah’s absolute belief in her right to build a water city in the desert refuses to recognize the environmental costs, or the costs to human and non-­ human life; and so echoes and demonstrates the transformation of greed under vampire capitalism from ‘I want’ to ‘I am entitled to’ (Kaplan 1991: 511). Significantly, her belief is couched – and understood by Leah herself – within the business terms of vampire capitalism: ‘accustomed to seeing obstacles removed – rolled or blasted out of her way’, Leah is ‘in the real estate business to make profits, not to save wildlife or save the desert’ (1991: 374, 375). As Silko makes quite clear from the phraseology here, Leah sees no connection between desert land, animal life forms and human populations: there are no inter-­ relationships in Leah’s way of thinking, which presents each ‘item’ (real estate, wildlife, desert) as entirely distinct and disconnected. Like many extra-­textual global corporate interests that focus solely on profit, Leah sees the effects of previous pollution as a reason to continue environmentally damaging behaviour, rather than the impetus to try to clean up business practices: ‘[i]t was too late for the desert around Tucson anyway. Look at it. Pollution was already killing the foothill paloverde trees’ (1991: 374). And Leah’s worldview is validated by the very workings of slow violence: as Nixon has argued,‘[s]tories of toxic build-­up, massing greenhouse gasses, or desertification may be cataclysmic, but they’re scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are deferred, often for generations’, meaning that the effects of slow violence on human and non-­human populations are effectively ‘discount[ed]’ (2006–7: 14, 15). Here, there is a distinct reliance upon the workings of economic and environmental slow violence, and the Tucson Judge Arne, who acts to legally facilitate Leah’s Venice project, states bluntly that concerns over the future of the local environment mean nothing to him: ‘Arne didn’t care; he would probably not live to see it: Tucson and Phoenix abandoned by hundreds of thousands after all the ground-­water had been consumed’ (1991: 651). Arne’s view here is a clear rejection of any notion of responsibility or obligation; and this is echoed by Leah, who refuses to see, and perhaps is even unable to see, beyond the short-­term profits. In response to uncertainty over the feasibility of her plans for ‘Mediterranean villas and canals’ (1991: 378) in the desert, Leah’s response exposes vampire capitalism’s pursuit of profit at all and any cost. Thus, although ‘[t]he amount of water needed for such a grand scheme was astonishing’, the water nonetheless ‘had to come from someplace’, and Leah expresses her absolute trust that ‘science will solve the water problem. . . . They’ll have to’ (1991: 375, 374, original emphasis). Immersed in the ‘greed creed’ of vampire capitalism that refuses to recognize finite limits and constantly strives

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for an unattainable ‘more’, Leah cannot accept the kinds of environmental limits that operate in the natural world, and refuses to consider that ‘human’ endeavours such as science and technology might also have limitations or consequences.7 Most significant is the impact upon the concept of sustainable living, which is depicted as absolutely incompatible with the ideologies and aspirations of vampire capitalism; and which for the twenty-­first-century reader of Silko’s text, therefore, worryingly reflects ongoing extra-­textual debates surrounding the veracity of climate change or climate change ‘denial’. Leah’s plans for resolving the ‘problems’ surrounding her development are perhaps the most significant, as there are profound implications for all forms of justice, not to mention the potentially devastating impact on numerous inter-­ related human and non-­human communities. Accordingly, Leah’s plans will succeed because Judge Arne has been paid to ‘dismiss a cross-­suit by the Indians’ and so over-­ride the legal rights of local tribal groups. More importantly, this operation of slow violence will remain invisible and impossible to trace because ‘[n]o link would ever be made between the outcome of an obscure water-­rights suit’ and Leah’s ‘applications for deep-­water wells in Tucson’ (1991: 376). Refusing to ‘settle for reclaimed sewage or Colorado River water’, Leah purchases cheap drilling rigs from business contacts in the Texan oil industry so she can drill for ‘cheap water’, regardless of the impact this will have upon the entire region’s reliance upon underground aquifers, or that these aquifers represent the sole source of water for many remote communities, both human and non-­human (1991: 375). Here, Leah’s actions reflect the extra-­textual environmentally destructive practices of ‘real-­world’ energy corporations such as Peabody Energy, which not only syphoned off the ground water upon which entire communities and eco-­systems are dependent, and wasted millions of gallons of water daily through production processes;8 but which also, importantly in the context of Almanac’s depiction of vampire capitalism, provided funding for a range of political lobbying groups that have since been identified as ‘the heart and soul of climate denial’.9 Like Peabody Energy, Leah’s relentless pursuit of water has a more sinister interpretation in the context of the desert southwest. As David N. Cassuto comments, the importance of water in the southwest should not be underestimated because ‘the power to control water carries with it the power the control life’, as the entire region is, quite literally, ‘dripping dry’ (2001: 21). And this point is crucial to Almanac’s representation of vampire capitalism: it is only when he sees the ‘scale models’ of Leah’s development, the absolute power her venture holds over all forms of life and her negation of any notion of obligation to those lives, that the disconnected, emotionally ‘dead’ and loveless Max feels any kind of response, ‘a flicker of interest’ and a ‘stir’ of ‘faint anticipation’ (1991: 378). Here, it is clear that the physical and even sexual/sexualized pleasure that Max derives from Leah’s plans to destroy an already fragile human and non-­human natural environment emerges directly from the seductive and eroticized nature of vampire capitalism. This seductive slow violence, coupled with vampire capitalism’s absolute refusal of any sense of grounded normativity, is evident in two further inter-­

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related and seemingly ‘legitimate’ Mexican-­based business ventures within the text: the innocuously named ‘Mario’s Luxury Bus Tours’, and Menardo’s ‘Universal Insurance’ company. While ‘Mario’s Luxury Bus Tours’ is one of Almanac’s most interesting examples of the fundamentally dishonest operations of ostensibly ‘legal’ vampire capitalist ventures, it is undoubtedly also one of the most cynical and ruthless of the exploitations on offer, a clear warning of the dangers of the kinds of unrestrained global markets promoted by Reaganomics. Tapping into the chaos of Almanac’s Mexico, where the ‘thousands . . . starving every day’ are forced to eat rats to survive and there is very real threat of ‘civil war’ (1991: 631, 663), Mario’s ‘business venture’ offers an upmarket ‘illegal border-­crossing’ to a rich Mexican clientele. Aligning itself with the top end of the tourism industry, Mario’s operation identifies itself as ‘luxury’ to attract Mexico’s social elites: the ‘doctors’ and socialites from the ‘country club[s]’, who are, from an American perspective, a more ‘acceptable’ face of Mexican immigration as they are all ‘light skinned and well dressed’ (1991: 665, 666). These wealthy and privileged clients pay $2,000 each for the ‘deluxe luxury tour’ that offers ‘a champagne brunch’ complete with ‘hostesses in maid uniforms’ and a ‘cocktail bar’, and takes advantage of the ‘special arrangements’ made with the US border authorities to allow customers to transport ‘jewels, antiques, and art without duties, or tax’ (1991: 474, 666, 668, 665, 667). Yet, like Leah’s Venice Arizona scheme which demands and commands complete control over life and death through its control of local water supplies, Mario’s Bus Tour also operates via the control of local natural resources. Determined to maximize profits in an increasingly uncertain home market, Mario’s clients are ‘abandoned’ in the desert and left to die, as the profits – their valuables and cash – are ‘redistributed’ (1991: 673). In this manner, Mario’s Luxury Bus Tours exposes its willing adherence to the ‘greed creed’ of vampire capitalism, demonstrating an utter indifference to human suffering that equates to inhumanity. Certainly, Mario’s illegal operation has no sense of obligation to its clients. Yet this lack of obligation, this deliberate negation of any sense of responsibility or recognition of relatedness is perhaps even more evident in one of Almanac’s ostensibly ‘legal’ business ventures: Menardo’s Universal Insurance company. Silko’s text exposes the exploitative nature of businesses such as this, bringing into question their morality, if not their actual legality; and demonstrating the reach and scope of such enterprises and their impact: this is, after all, ‘universal’. As a result, Almanac clearly shows that Menardo – like Trigg, like Leah, like ‘Mario’ – quite literally profits from the losses of others. Providing insurance against losses of every kind, Menardo offers a ‘guarantee’ against unexpected events. Intervening into the global market, Menardo’s ‘extremely expensive’ policies offer ‘guaranteed 100-percent coverage’ against every eventuality including ‘acts of God, mutinies, war, and revolution’ (1991: 261). Significantly, the interpretation of ‘natural’ disasters as ‘Acts of God’ exposes the insurance industry’s replication and regurgitation of established Christian doctrine that asserts human dominion over the natural world, and so suggests

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that Menardo’s form of vampire capitalism is simply one of the results to be expected from cultural ideologies that fail to recognize, and indeed all too often actively deny, any notion of grounded normativity. Menardo’s ‘greatest triump[h]’ is his protection of a warehouse full of ‘new appliances just shipped from the United States’ from a tidal wave (1991: 262). Menardo’s determination to protect inanimate electrical goods regardless of the cost, either in emergency wages or in innocent human lives, demonstrates the power and priorities of the market, as does the fact that the source of profit (the electrical appliances) is evacuated before the rescue of incapacitated and vulnerable hospital patients. As Almanac ironically states: ‘not a single new appliance had been lost . . . although the hospital is destroyed’ (1991: 263). Importantly, this event also demonstrates that humans retain and maintain their dominion over the Earth. Although ostensibly ‘legal’, Menardo’s business clearly has moral questions to answer within Silko’s novel, and is even constructed as morally questionable in its denial of either obligation or relatedness. Universal Insurance thus provides a clear example of the seductive processes of vampire capitalism: the key to Menardo’s business success is his ability to perceive and provide ‘exactly what people wanted to hear’ (1991: 260). More importantly, this seduction masks the true nature of Menardo’s business, the ‘calculated callousness’ that is required of elite financial interests where ‘only the fittest (read most ruthless) survive’ (Kenway and Fahey 2010: 722, 720).

Vampire capital’s covert ‘partners’ As in the ‘real’ or extra-­textual world, what makes vampire capitalism so successful and so pervasive in Almanac is the ‘calculated callousness’ of its ‘ruthless’ relationships to a range of powerful covert ‘partners’: the socio-­ economic elites; and diverse and far-­reaching socio-­political institutional systems and structures. While my use of the term ‘partner’ is, in part, a deliberate reflection of the business world that Almanac discusses, it is nonetheless an accurate description of the complicity evident between a range of powerful and exclusive bedfellows. Like the fictional vampire, these powerful partners thrive via our unwillingness or inability to perceive them: as Laurence Rickels commented in The Vampire Lectures, ‘required to believe only what is believable, you cannot acknowledge or know even what you see before you’ (1999: 98, emphasis added). This is, in part, because the interactions of these partners – both within the text and without – act not only to naturalize the capitalist system but also to present it to us as the only viable possibility. As a result, any notion of an alternative is refuted and (most) opposition is negated. Importantly, certainly in the context of Almanac’s textual concerns, these partnerships also exploit vampire capitalism’s ability to create vast divisions in wealth in order to maintain and perpetuate long-­established social hierarchies. In short, these covert partners act to keep the world’s wealth firmly out of reach of the majority

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and in the hands of the few. In this context, vampire capitalism’s most important partners in Almanac – and those with which it has shared financial and ideological interests – are, on the one hand, the established social elites, whose wealth derives from inherited fortunes and privileges which are also, increasingly, supplemented by business interests; and, on the other hand, the powers represented by the law, and systems and structures such as political institutions and law-­enforcement groups, including the police and the military. Almanac’s exposure of the interactions of these complicit yet invisible partnerships is significant because it also exposes the ways in which systemic oppression, much like economic and environmental slow violence, is itself attritional and so equally difficult to identify or combat. For the twenty-­firstcentury reader of Silko’s novel, these points take on further meaning. In the wake of the impact of popular awareness of global resistance movements such as Occupy and Idle No More, and of the profound political sea changes caused in 2016 by unexpected events such as the UK Brexit referendum result and the election of the forty-­fifth American President Donald J. Trump, many societies worldwide have seen an unexpected and widespread rise in socio-­political consciousness at a grassroots level. Almanac now speaks directly to new and increasingly receptive audiences. Once again, Silko’s novel here demands extra-­textual context. According to Mike Savage and Karel Williams, ‘the last twenty years of the twentieth century’ saw ‘the most rapid and dramatic shift of income, assets and resources in favour of the very rich that has ever taken place in human history’ (2008: 1) And, as Savage and Williams have argued, it happened at the direct expense of the poor, who were made poorer through a ‘raiding of the commons’ (2008: 1). In other words, the deliberate assertion, by one tiny social group, of ownership over the majority of wealth-­generating resources that should, in fact, remain the ‘common’ property of every member of society. Importantly for the context of Almanac, Savage and Williams located this shift firmly in the years following the socio-­economic upheavals of the 1980s, following the normalization of vampire capitalism’s ‘greed creed’. The result of social and economic policy changes in America since the 1980s has been a doubling of the income of the top earners and a return ‘to pre-1914 levels of income inequality’ (Savage and Williams 2008: 1). As Savage and Williams commented, this ‘redistribution’ of wealth is alarmingly ‘regressive’ (2008: 1), and the implication is a return to the kind of ‘feudal’ mentality that has long marked international social elites, and been a source of their continued power. Of course, this kind of mentality is deeply problematic for any number of reasons, not least because it allows social elites to openly demonstrate their belief in their own ‘rights’, or their sense of their inherent entitlement, without fear of criticism or contradiction. As Kaplan has pointed out, the insatiable, even ‘pathological’, drive for relentless accumulation (and the need to protect what is accumulated at all costs), is almost always associated with, and inseparable from, ‘a sense of narcissistic . . . entitlement’ (1991: 506, 511). Indeed, in the kind of societies demanded by

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vampire capitalism, this attitude is most often defined as ‘aspirational’ thinking, as opposed to a reduction in both social justice and political democracy. Yet, as Savage and Williams pointed out, what is remarkable about social elites in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries is, like the vampire itself, their ‘glaring invisibility’, especially within the social, legal and political structures where they wield such influence upon decision-­making and policy (2008: 2). Almanac not only draws attention to representatives of these invisible yet influential elites, it also exposes the ways in which power (here linked primarily to wealth) operates. Most importantly, Almanac demonstrates the complicity between elite, socially privileged individuals and oppressive, detrimental and undemocratic social attitudes and practices. Since ‘democracy’ is most often defined as ‘rule by the common people’, this point is crucial to Almanac’s analysis of the relationships between wealth and socio-­political power. In this context, two of the most complex and problematic characters of the text, Beaufrey and Serlo, are drawn from just such an elite group. Because their business interests are so ‘diverse’ and the reach of their influence so pervasive, it is notable that both Beaufrey and Serlo also feature prominently in the next two chapters of this study, as key examples of the kinds of oppressive practices under analysis. Each derives from a different elite American background: Beaufrey is descended from early US settlers (he is, notably, a Mayflower descendant) and has an ‘august’ European ‘lineage’; while the Colombian Serlo is descended from the ‘genuine blue blood’ of Europe (1991: 535). Both are, therefore, inextricably linked through their shared experiences of wealth, power and entitlement; as well as how these experiences shape their business ‘interests’. More problematically, they are also linked through their shared belief in rigidly enforced social hierarchies and a range of discriminatory attitudes and practices: in the context of Savage and Williams’s argument regarding the regressive nature of capitalism since the 1980s, both Beaufrey and Serlo are fascinated by the feudal system that they have inherited via their ‘sangre pura’, or ‘pure blood’ (1991: 535). Their shared obsession is, therefore, with the status and power of aristocracy, and with ‘le droit de seigneur [that] had corrupted [the aristocracy] absolutely’ via a reversal of the process ordinarily expected to ‘improve’ the ‘bloodlines’ of those socially and/or racially inferior (1991: 535). While Almanac makes no claims for the existence or otherwise of actual historical instances of the exercise of sexual rights by the European aristocracies over their social inferiors, there is nonetheless a pertinent parallel drawn between this notion and the exercise of absolute entitlement by social elites: the process by which ‘I want’ becomes ‘I am entitled to’ (Kaplan 1991: 511). Significantly, the sexualization of this process here can be traced, both textually and extra-­textually, to the enforced imposition of a gendered patriarchal authority, and institutional (and institutionalized) forms of sexual and sexualized violence, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. What is significant about both Beaufrey and Serlo is the way in which their determination to impose their authority and their absolute belief in their own

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innate superiority is inseparable from their utter disconnection from, and disinterest in, all other human life. Like Almanac’s vampire capitalists, both are bereft of love of any kind, with the exception of narcissistic self-­love. This is immediately evident in Beaufrey’s realization that he feels absolute ‘indifference’ towards others, and so his utter disconnection is most evident in his comparison of himself to others: others did not fully exist – they were only ideas that flitted across his consciousness then disappeared. . . . . Beaufrey . . . existed more completely than any other human being he had ever met. . . . Beaufrey knew only he could truly feel or truly suffer. (1991: 533, emphasis added)

Importantly, it is this disconnect, this emphatic refusal of any sense of relatedness and so of any sense of obligation to others, that enables Beaufrey – and the processes of vampire capitalism more widely – to exploit and oppress all the more ruthlessly. It is no surprise to the reader, therefore, that Beaufrey’s childhood obsession is with Albert Fish, ‘the Long Island cannibal’ and ‘child molester’ who is described, like Beaufrey himself, as descended from ‘blue bloods directly off the Mayflower’ (1991: 534). Beaufrey’s obsession is shown to derive from his sense of their shared characteristics: he and Fish are ‘kindred spirits because they shared not only social rank, but complete indifference about the life or death of other human beings’ (1991: 534). It is important to note that, via Fish’s declared status as a molester of children, he and Beaufrey also share a profound enjoyment of wielding power over those who are more, in this context most, vulnerable. Here, alongside the vampire and the grave-­ robber, our understanding of the operations of oppression and capitalism in Silko’s text is expanded to include the cannibal. While the cannibal has long been a trope for the absorption of difference and the creation of hegemony, in the late-­twentieth-­century worlds of Silko’s novel, the cannibal is deployed within the context of vampire capitalism to denote capitalist consumption which, as Crystal Bartlovich argues in an ironic yet apt parody of Fredric Jameson, can be identified as the ‘cultural logic of late cannibalism’ (1998: 204). Importantly, given Silko’s consideration of the operations of power in Almanac, cannibalism can here also be interpreted as a metaphor for ‘[t]he accumulation of wealth – by the few at the expense of the many’ to expose what Jerry Phillips identifies as ‘the profound irrationality of a system that must perforce devour itself ’ (1998: 183, 185). With Beaufrey, therefore, we remain firmly located within the ‘corpse economy’. Beaufrey’s absolute acceptance of his status as a ‘superior bein[g]’ links him inextricably to Serlo and his notions of ‘sangre pura’ (1991: 535). Like Beaufrey, Serlo is obsessed with his social status and ancestry, and his ‘most engaging conversations’ with Beaufrey ‘concer[n] the importance of lineage’ (1991: 541). Serlo’s attitude is clearly marked by his socialization, or lack of it: his

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abandonment by his parents and his subsequent sexual abuse – significantly non-­penetrative – at the hands of his grandfather. Teaching him that sexual penetration is ‘unnecessary, and rotten with disease’, Serlo’s grandfather advocates ‘masturbation into steel cylinders’ so that the semen from Serlo’s ‘noble blood’ can be ‘frozen for future use’ in the genetic ‘upgrad[ing]’ of the ‘masses’ (1991: 546, 547). Serlo’s fascination with genetically ‘improving’ the socially and racially ‘inferior’ is deployed within Almanac as a late twentieth-­ century pseudo-­scientific reinterpretation of the elite ‘tradition’ of le droit de seigneur. This redeployment exposes the racist histories of genetic research to suggest that science has itself become one of vampire capitalism’s covert partners, a significant topic that – alongside Serlo’s role within it – will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3. Serlo’s widely recognized status (within his own circles, at least) as ‘the last and oldest boy virgin’ traces his vehement rejection of all human contact, and he explicitly never ‘allow[s] another human being to touch him’ sexually after his grandfather’s death (1991: 547). Here, Serlo’s form of extreme ‘individualism’ demonstrates the kinds of lovelessness upon which vampire capitalism is predicated. Moreover, it both feeds and is fed by the core ‘values’ of vampire capitalism which, quite simply, refuse any sense of – or space for – either obligation or relatedness. What is fascinating about Almanac’s depiction of both Beaufrey and Serlo are the ways in which the actions of such ordinarily invisible covert ‘partners’ expose their complicity in upholding and maintaining the ideologies and socio-­ economic structures of vampire capitalism. Significantly, Serlo and Beaufrey’s belief in their own innate superiority both as members of the social elite and as ‘businessmen’, drives not only their own actions but vampire capitalism itself. Thus Beaufrey comments that: Those with sangre pura were entirely different beings, on a far higher plane, inconceivable to commoners. They might crave roasted flesh. What of it? There was nothing in the world that money could not buy. (1991: 535)

Here, Beaufrey demonstrates the clear distinctions between elite and ‘commoner’, arguing that not only are the elite beyond the comprehension of their social inferiors, but that the behaviour of the elites – regardless of its nature – is thus beyond question or reproach. Since the commoner is inextricably historically linked to common land, and since common land is, according to Peter Linebaugh, one of the first casualties of both aristocratic consolidations of powers and of early capitalism, Silko’s representations here make interesting connections to Linebaugh’s suggestion that the elite theft of common land marks a violent fracture in the human relationship with the natural world (2014: 19). This is a good point at which to also remember Savage and Williams’ assertion that the last years of the twentieth century, to which Almanac responds, saw the most overt ‘raiding of the commons’ ever witnessed (2008: 1).

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It is also a timely point at which to recall Terry Tempest Williams’ argument in favour of the ‘open space of democracy’ which, she asserts, ‘is not interested in hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power not reserved for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many’ (2004: 59). Beaufrey’s speech here, therefore, exposes the historical operations of vampire capitalism in conjunction with elite covert partners that remove the very physical spaces required for any sense of ‘grounded normativity’ for the majority of ‘commoners’. Importantly, Beaufrey’s elite status – and so his right to that status – is posited here as an evolutionary process, and so naturalized via a pseudo-­scientific ‘genetic’ discourse that acts specifically to conceal the workings of vampire capitalism. And the implication is, of course, that this argument applies to social elites more widely, both within the text and without. As a direct consequence, Almanac highlights the ways in which the social elites within the text consider themselves above the law, and indeed operate – and are treated – as if this is the case. In a statement that exposes his own belief that late-­twentieth-century vampire capitalism has enabled a return to aristocratic feudalism, Beaufrey comments that ‘[l]aws in England and the United States traced their origins to the “courts” of feudal lords who had listened to complaints and testimony and then passed judgement on the serfs’ (1991: 535). Most significantly, such laws exist not only to maintain the elite powerbase, but to enable elites to continue to ‘pass judgement on the serfs’. Beaufrey’s use here of early modern terminologies not only exposes complex and often invisible histories, but also takes on problematic and powerful resonances both in the late twentieth-century world that Almanac depicts, and for Silko’s twenty-­ first-century readers. And this is because Almanac’s message here is clear: Beaufrey’s claim – that there is an ongoing complicity between social elites and the law in every modern Western ‘democracy’, simply because the law in such countries derives from, and so can never be free of, elite influence and interference – is one that cannot help but have extra-­textual reverberations. It is important to note, therefore, that the removal of justice in Silko’s text cannot be separated from a removal of democracy; or that the removal of democracy itself springs directly from an elite usurpation of the common lands at the expense of the majority of the world’s human and non-­human populations, and at the expense of human understandings of the reciprocal relations and obligations of grounded normativity. This absence of reciprocity or obligation is evident in Beaufrey’s fascination with ‘things, places, or beings that were not for sale’ because ‘he got a thrill out of what was unavailable or forbidden’ and, more specifically, because ‘[t]he words unavailable and forbidden did not apply to aristocrats’ (1991: 535, original emphasis). The law, therefore, plays a crucial role in Almanac in enabling established socio-­economic power structures, alongside the complicit – yet often invisible or obscured – involvement of law-­makers, -dispensers and -enforcers: the politicians, the judiciary, and the police and military. Again, to fully understand Almanac here, the reader must once more look to the extra-­textual world to

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which Silko as a novelist is responding. In his analysis of the social policies of the Reagan era, Joel Krieger commented comprehensively on the mutually supportive roles played by a range of elite groups and their socio-­political effects for the majority, which included ‘[t]he radical marginalization of the working poor, the ideological assaults on the integrity and dignity of recipients of welfare benefits, the use of the Justice Department to abate affirmative action in hiring and education for women and blacks, the prominence of homophobia and challenges to female sexuality and reproductive rights in government voices and New Right politics … the use by Reagan of the racist code words “state rights”’, all of which ‘suggests the agenda of ideological transformations in the Reagan era”’ (1987: 194). In the context of complicit partnerships, it is clear from Kreiger’s analysis that there were mutually supportive relationships between a number of powerful socio-­political institutions and the Reagan administration that had profound consequences for those social groups targeted by government policy. What is notable, of course, about the majority of the highly influential extra-­textual elite individuals of the Reagan era discussed by Krieger is that they are deeply embedded within male-­dominated patriarchal social structures and institutions (discussed fully in the next chapter); and thus deeply invested in maintaining the socio-­political and ideological status quo. While the post of Chief Justice (and those of the other Supreme Court justices) are linked to the concept of impartiality that is embodied in the notion of a ‘blind’ justice, the situation is nonetheless implicitly open to abuse since the Chief Justice is nominated and appointed by elected politicians with ideological agendas. This problematic contradiction is clearly evident in Krieger’s analysis when he comments on the Reagan administration’s appointment of a Chief Justice, William Hubbs Rehnquist, who openly expressed oppressive views towards the implementation of equality of all kinds, plus the political ‘use’ that the Reagan administration subsequently made of the Justice Department. Both examples advanced the political and ideological agenda of the government while simultaneously acting to further undermine the rights of many American citizens. Justice, in this case, was far from impartial, which is of central importance not only to the implementation of increasingly draconian social policies but also to their acceptance as just by the American public more widely. For Almanac’s twenty-­first-century readers, this 1980s context has interesting and complex reverberations with the Trump administration in 2017. Like Reagan’s own legacy, the legacy of Chief Justice Rehnquist continues to impact upon American legal, political and social life in the twenty-­first century. As Thomas W. Merrill has noted, because of Rehnquist’s tenure,10 the Supreme Court now ‘enjoys a degree of influence in American society unequalled at any time in its history’ (2006: 494). Likewise, Madhavi M. McCall and Michael A. McCall have commented that Rehnquist has ‘left a profound mark on the [Supreme] Court and on American politics more generally’ (2006: 323). Indeed,

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Rehnquist’s subsequent power is evident in one of the most controversial legal rulings of recent times, where law intersected with both politics and democratic processes to prevent a recount of the Florida ballot in the 2000 presidential election and, as a direct result, facilitated the ‘non-­election’ of President George W. Bush. In this particular extra-­textual example, we can begin to see the invisible yet indissoluble connections between law and democracy, and the ways in which one of the legal legacies of the 1980s is a ‘redraw[ing of] the boundaries of capitalist democracy in America’ (Krieger 1987: 194). The changes implemented during the 1980s and their continued impact upon American society are, therefore, profound. Merrill has argued that the ‘sphere of judicial oversight over controversial social policy issues has continued to expand unabated’, pointing out that: In addition to being in charge of policy on abortion, the death penalty, and religious expression in public places, the [Supreme] Court is now also in charge of policy on gay rights, affirmative action, pornography on the internet, the regulation of advertising, the use of political patronage in local government, the structure of state primary elections – the list goes on and on. (2006: 494)

What is clearly problematic from this list is that crucially significant socio-­ political issues are being decided by those who, far from being impartial, have vested interests in advancing a specific political ideological agenda. Much like the increasing flow of wealth to the rich, Rehnquist’s most significant legacy is the regressive influence of the Supreme Court upon American social policy, and its alliance with and support of oppressive political ideologies. It is precisely these kinds of problematic relationships between such covert partners and vampire capitalism that Almanac traces, commenting upon the far-­reaching socio-­political consequences. Accordingly, Almanac provides ironic echoes of Rehnquist’s championing of ‘states’ rights’, in full recognition of the problematic nature of the term’s historic deployment as a symbol of oppression, and specifically of white racism and supremacy. According to Kreiger’s analysis, the term ‘states’ rights’ is a ‘racist code’ (1987: 194). As a result, both Rehnquist’s and Almanac’s deployment of the notion of ‘states’ rights’ is inseparable either from the term’s deployment by southern states for racist ends from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era, or from Reagan’s own public embracing of the term during his 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan’s use of the term remains exceptionally controversial for three specific reasons. First, it was deliberately used at the site, in Mississippi, where three Civil Rights activists had been brutally lynched in 1964 in the name of states’ rights by a splinter group of the Ku Klux Klan, which included law-­enforcement officers and caused sufficient national public outrage to ensure the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1965). Second, Reagan’s use of the term in this context also gave a clear signal to those Klansmen present that he (and, by implication, his future

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administration) were aware of, and potentially even sympathetic to, their views; with the further connotation that Reagan and his team were also supportive of Mississippi’s invocation of states’ rights as a reason to refuse to prosecute those responsible for the murders of 1964. Third, the use of the term suggested that Reagan’s election would ensure much less federal interference in local issues which, in this context, could only be interpreted as an endorsement of the kinds of local ‘values’ that had been evident in the 1964 lynching. Accordingly, as Jesse Jackson, Jr pointed out, ‘Reagan was sending a states’ rights signal to all conservatives . . . that their states would be given freedom even if it was at the expense of justice’ (2004). In addition, although ostensibly championing of the rights of individual states over federal rights or the rights of the nation, states’ rights actually ensure, as Lisa L. Miller noted, a ‘hinder[ing]’ of ‘political participation and policy innovation by board segments of the population’ because ‘federalism facilitates political activity by the exceptionally highly organized and those with the most robust resources’ while ‘exacerbat[ing] existing race and class stratifications because citizens in greatest need of broad and deep political mobilization are those with the least capacity to sustain it’ in such ‘fractured political terrain’ (2011). For Miller, therefore, this further facilitates ‘the tyranny of the minority’ (2011); or, to use Almanac’s own terms, such events and actions further facilitate the tyranny of vampire capitalism and its complicit partners. There are, for Almanac’s twenty-­first-century readers, disturbing echoes in the rhetoric of President Trump since his inauguration in January 2017. These controversial and far-­reaching extra-­textual ideologies are traced in Almanac in a range of powerful figures from the political and legal worlds. Like Reagan and Rehnquist, the corrupt fictional Judge Arne believes ardently ‘in states’ rights, absolutely’, which he personally demonstrates through his alliances: his ‘moonlight jobs’ for the ‘retired’ mobster Max Blue. Arne thus facilitates the ‘desired results’ identified by Max’s corporate ‘clients’ through his own production of the required legal ‘decisions’; and acts as ‘liaison’ to enable further mutually beneficial relationships between those clients and the local police chief and senator (1991: 376). What is significant about Judge Arne is that he acts as a facilitator not simply for shadowy and less than legal figures such as Max Blue or his corporate clients, but also for the US government itself. Arne is therefore ‘proud to do his part’ by ‘cooperat[ing]’ with ‘the special Treasury agents’ who carefully ‘explained’ the ‘national security issues’ that would be compromised by his conviction of ‘cocaine smuggler[s]’ (1991: 648, 647). For Arne, the case is simple: ‘[a]fter the US military had been accused of smuggling drugs from Southeast Asia and Central America in military aircraft’, it was inevitable that ‘independent contractors’ from the ‘private sector’ became involved, as the US pursued its drive to eradicate the greatest problem in the Americas and the greatest threat to American national security: communism (1991: 647). Here, Almanac engages with one of the most far-­reaching political events of the Reagan era, to comment directly on the Iran–Contra controversy

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that engulfed both American politics and the military to its very highest levels in the late 1980s, including questions regarding President Reagan’s own role in events. As the greatest political controversy in American politics since Watergate and the ‘fall’ of Richard Nixon, the Iran–Contra scandal saw secret and illegal arms sales by the Reagan administration to Iran, the subject of an international arms embargo, to secure the release of US hostages (known as the ‘weapons-­ for-hostages’ deal). It also, subsequently, saw the use of some of the financial proceeds from these sales by US intelligence agencies to fund the Contra rebels in their fight against the legally and democratically elected socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, an act that also directly contravened Congressional legislation. In this context, what we are shown in Almanac are the ways in which the direct connections between vampire capitalism, elite power and institutional systems act to assault and negate the very concept of ‘democracy’. From the viewpoint of Judge Arne, Almanac’s reader is shown the conservative political arguments surrounding these controversial extra-­textual events of the late 1980s. We see that Judge Arne understands that ‘cocaine smuggling could be tolerated for the greater good, which was the destruction of communism in Central and South America’, moreover he understands that ‘communism was a far greater threat to the United States than drug addiction was’ because ‘[a]ddicts didn’t live long’ (1991: 648). In this context, Judge Arne ‘like all dedicated conservatives, understood the greatest dangers to a nation lay within, among its own people who had become degenerate and betrayed their Christian nation . . . The Judge was proud to do his part against the spread of communism in the Americas’ (1991: 648). Here, Almanac openly provides its readers with access to the main extra-­textual conservative political defences that were advanced during the scandal to explain and justify American ‘interventions’ in Iran and Nicaragua. Calling attention to the inherent moral ‘values’ that must also be advanced to maintain this defence, Almanac also fully displays the relationships between the covert partners of vampire capitalism. The world in which ‘[c]ocaine smuggling could be tolerated for the greater good’, where the ‘greater good’ equates to ‘the destruction of communism’ via the overthrow of democratically elected governments, and where addiction can be overlooked because ‘[a]ddicts didn’t live long’ and can be identified as a transient problem, is undeniably also the world of Beaufrey and Serlo that is marked by indifference and the refusal to acknowledge either inter-­relatedness or obligation (1991: 648). In a direct extra-­textual nod to Reagan’s America, Arne equates those unfortunate and vulnerable enough to be ‘addicts’ with ‘degeneracy’ and national ‘betray[al]’, marking drug users as insubordinate within the vampire capitalist system and so ripe for ‘punishment’ (1991: 648). The indisputable links between Arne’s sentiments here and Trigg’s dismissal of his ‘donors’ as a waste of ‘good’ money reiterates again the invisible connections that Silko’s novel repeatedly makes between these different forms of oppressive and attritional slow violence. What is significant about the Judge’s attitude is not simply his utter disregard of law and justice, but his very willing use of his own

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position of power within the legal system to advance unjust and undemocratic political and military agendas, provided they are ‘pitched’ as essential to ‘national security’. Moreover, this willingness to compromise American justice and democracy is identified as ‘sophisticated’, as evidence of human (and Arne’s own) ‘progress’ (1991: 648). Avoiding the urge to simply point the finger of blame at individuals, as the original ‘official’ extra-­textual Irangate inquiry had attempted to do, Almanac’s fictional replaying of the ‘Irangate’ events and prominent ideological arguments instead exposes the wider, more problematic systemic problems that enabled and facilitated the events. Almanac therefore traces the myriad complex interlinked political and financial entities and systems that colluded to ensure that international and domestic democracy was undermined and eroded, and that notions of obligation were overturned. ‘Real’ life here merges with the socio-­political ‘dirt’ of Silko’s text, as Almanac’s readers are forced to re-­consider the complicit mutually supportive relationships between elite groups of these kinds, particularly in their imposition of specific ideologically driven forms of ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ upon the social majority, while any sense of reciprocity or obligation is simultaneously removed. In this context, it is significant that, as Harold Hongju Koh has suggested, this particular ‘real-­world’ scandal was not ‘an historical aberration’ but ‘symptomatic of a chronic dysfunction’ in the US political system (1988: 1255). As Koh very persuasively argues, the real failing of the investigation into Irangate was that the entire affair was identified as evolving ‘mainly from the wayward acts of a few colorful personalities’ which ensured that there was never any question of ‘a more fundamental failure of legal structure’ that would have necessitated ‘a legislative revamping of the statutory framework that governs . . . foreign affairs’ (1988: 1257). It is precisely this kind of systemic failure, coupled with a concerted protection of elite entitlement and privilege of every kind, with which Almanac is concerned. Accordingly, the comparison between the illegal dealings that profit powerful American political and military entities and those that profit much more shadowy ‘private businesses’ – both domestic and international – is barely perceived, and certainly not protested, by the majority of Almanac’s characters. For those textual characters in thrall to vampire capitalism, the general consensus seems to be that business is just that, business; there need be no differentiation between ‘clients’ provided that profits remain unaffected. Emulating the kinds of corrupt vampire capitalism associated with ‘Gekkoian’ insider trading and made infamous by the 1987 stock market crash,11 Max Blue thus receives regular ‘national security briefing[s]’ from ‘the senator [who] served on the select committee on National Security’ and who has ‘invaluable sources to leaks at the highest levels’ (1991: 637). As Almanac makes clear, the workings of elite privilege can be detected within the very legal structures in Tucson, which is reported to have ‘gained national attention as an example of harmony and understanding between law enforcement and the local business community’ due to the active participation of ‘every socially prominent Tucson

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family’ in the socio-­political power structure (1991: 643). In this context, Judge Arne dwells repeatedly on ‘good breeding’ and comments on his own ‘blue blood’ pedigree that derives, notably, from the east: from ‘a Mississippi timber dynasty’ (1991: 645).12 And these same ideas of social privilege are replicated south of the border, in the exclusive and influential Mexican El Grupo club to which belong the local Police Chief, the military General J., the local Governor, the former ambassador, and the insurance magnate and vampire capitalist Menardo. Masquerading as an ‘afternoon shooting club’, El Grupo identify their ‘business’ as ‘of the most serious nature: they govern the many; all the more reason they had to fortify, even indulge, themselves in every way’ (1991: 331, 330). All of the US individuals and groups involved – the Judge, the Senator and the local Tucson police – see no difference in their deals with, or work on behalf of, state military interests, and the interests of corporate individuals and entities. Accordingly, there are no distinctions made between the ‘special planeloads’ organized by the shadowy government-­linked figure Mr Greenlee and Mr B, the ‘retired major’ who had been ‘working for more than ten years against the communists in Mexico and Guatemala’ (1991: 647, 434, 637), and the interests of Max Blue’s assassination ‘industry’, Leah Blue’s real estate and water rights abuses, Trigg’s blood and organ harvesting, or the more geographically remote activities of Universal Insurance in Mexico, with its links to the Mexican police and military. As Almanac demonstrates, the significance in this lack of discrimination between a range of different abuses of power means that the majority of those I have named can be identified and linked as business ‘partners’; each working to protect and advance the power of the others, as the success (or failure) of each is inextricably interwoven. In this context, and in a telling echo of the socially elitist sentiments and beliefs of Beaufrey, Max Blue comments that he ‘could have any person or any thing in the world if he wanted it badly enough to make a series of telephone calls to his lawyers or his bankers’ (1991: 377). As the novel draws seemingly disparate threads and ‘interests’ together, it becomes not only apparent but undeniable that the workings of vampire capitalism, social privilege and the law cannot be separated any more than their results can. Max’s sons Sonny and Bingo, therefore, broker deals with shadowy state ‘representatives’ of ‘the Company’ (1991: 331), such as Greenlee and B, to fly in shipments of cocaine that have been ‘cleared’ with the local American law enforcement; Greenlee and B themselves make deals with Menardo to make use of Universal Insurance and its influence with the Mexican military; an Argentine film-­maker usurps the Mexican police chief ’s ‘interrogations’ of suspected offenders to produce (and profit from the market for) sexually explicit torture videos (1991: 341); while Menardo himself seizes the opportunity to deal directly with Sonny Blue, selling him the ‘foreign businessman’s protection package’ that includes ‘the use of Universal Insurance’s “air force” ’ and ‘in the event of emergencies, one of General J.’s Learjets’ (1991: 435). Significantly, these ‘partnerships’ show the only kind of reciprocity

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permitted by Almanac’s vampire capitalism, where what little sense of obligation is present between these partners is entirely exploitative, to be tolerated only as long as it produces mutual ‘profit’. With the notable exception of Leah Blue, what is significant about all of the key institutional and systemic ‘players’ that I have discussed in this chapter is that they are all male. Equally notably, all of these male characters occupy positions of very real economic, legal, military, political and social power. Like the social elites represented by Beaufrey and Serlo, all these male characters also act in accord to maintain the socio-­political status quo; and all, without exception, demonstrate through their actions, thoughts or opinions that the only acceptable socio-­political hierarchy is emphatically patriarchal. In other words, they promote a socio-­political structure that ‘promotes male privilege by being male-­dominated, male-­identified, and male-­centered’ and, moreover, is ‘organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women’ (Johnson 2014: 5–6, original emphasis). In its representations of these kinds of ingrained patriarchal misogyny, Almanac is not remarkable. But what is remarkable are the resilient, potentially indestructible, links that Almanac demonstrates between male socio-­political power, misogyny and a whole variety of forms of gendered, sexual, and sexualized socio-­political ‘controls’. As the next chapter explores in detail, what is crucial to the successful operation and mutual cooperation of Almanac’s vampire capitalism and its complicit partners with systemic patriarchal ideology is the gendered and sexualized institutionalization of violence.

Notes 1 Leslie Marmon Silko, cited in ‘Listening to the Spirits: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko’, Ellen Arnold, Studies in American Indian Literatures (10:3, Fall 1998), 23–4. 2 The uses of technological advances within popular resistance movements that reflect Silko’s consideration of ‘Revolucíon’ are discussed more fully in Chapter 4. 3 Silko’s deployment of Marx and Marxist thought is analysed more fully in Chapter 6. 4 See George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1998). 5 The connections between Almanac’s politics and the politics of the Idle No More movement are explored further in Chapter 6. 6 Trigg can, notably, find ‘no [profitable] market for dark cadaver skin’, a fact that emphasizes the racialization of poverty in America during this era since the implication is that those requiring ‘dark skin’ (burns victims, etc.) cannot afford the ‘product’ (1991: 404). 7 This example of outrageous textual excess has, ironically, proved to be remarkably prescient. In an example of life imitating art, Leah’s scheme prefigured a subsequent

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extra-­textual development: the billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s creation of The Venetian casino in Las Vegas. Opening in 1999 at a vast cost and with an almost obscene use of water given its desert setting, The Venetian ‘[r]e-­creat[es] Venice’s legendary landmarks’ and a series of canals. Like Leah’s own business plans, Adelson’s re-­creation demonstrates the tenets of vampire capitalism: wasteful extravagance, an exceptional lack of ecological awareness, and an absolute indifference to (and denial of any responsibility for) environmental impact. For full details and images, see The Venetian website, at http://www.venetian.com. 8 For details of Peabody’s industrial processes and their environmental impact (and those of other corporate interests), see V. B. Price, The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment since the Manhattan Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011). Further information regarding tribal responses is available from Black Mesa Indigenous Support, at http://www.blackmesais.org. 9 See ‘Biggest US coal company funded dozens of groups questioning climate change’, Suzanne Goldenberg and Helena Bengtsson, The Guardian (13 June 2016), https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/13/peabody-­energy-coal-­miningclimate-­change-denial-­funding. 10 Appointed in 1986, Rehnquist died in office in 2004. 11 See Chapter 6 for a comparison of the causes and effects of the financial catastrophes of 1987 and 2008. 12 See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of the interactions of elite power and sexual acts.

Chapter 3 I nstitutionalized violence : Patriarchy, G ender and Sexuality

Patriarchy’s roots are also the roots of most human misery and injustice, including race, class, and ethnic oppression, and the ongoing destruction of the natural environment.1 In his influential critical analysis of the operations of gender and patriarchy, Allan G. Johnson attempted to ‘unrave[l] our patriarchal legacy’; contending, as the epigraph above states, that the ‘human misery and injustice’ caused by systemic and institutionalized patriarchal structures is equalled only by ‘the ongoing destruction of the natural environment’ (2014). Like Nixon’s slow environmental violence that was linked in the last chapter to the slow violence effected by capitalism, the ‘delayed destruction[s]’ resulting from systemic patriarchy work in similarly attritional ways, eating away at our resistance and at any suggestion of an ‘alternative’ (Nixon 2011: 12). Patriarchal violences are thus insidious, both naturalized and normalized: as Gerda Lerner argued in her seminal study The Creation of Patriarchy, this ‘system of male dominance’ has actively and wilfully ‘mystified’ itself to appear ‘ahistoric, eternal, invisible, and unchanging’ even though it is quite clearly a relatively recent social and political construction (1986: 37). The effect, as with capitalism, is to make the workings of patriarchy just as difficult to see or combat. While we see – and are encouraged to condemn – individual male acts of gendered violence, the multiple gendered violences enacted by the patriarchal system itself remain obscure and obscured. By default, this makes any would-­be challenges difficult to mount, and just as easy for patriarchal systems, and the institutions and individuals within those systems, to dismiss and reject; as Johnson commented, ‘powerful forces encourage us to keep ourselves in a state of denial, to rationalize what we have been taught’ (2014: 30). Importantly, those most likely to point to the imbalances of the patriarchal system – women – are those who, within that system, have no ‘cultural authority’ to do so (Johnson 2014: 113). Much like the operations of capitalism already assessed, systemic patriarchy therefore presents itself in ways that make it ‘impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative’ (Fisher 2009: 2, original emphasis), because its operations and the control it effects are all too often ‘as invisible as the air we

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breathe’ (McNally 2012: 15). This naturalization occurs, Johnson has argued, because the very fabric of patriarchal culture ensures that our world is ‘male dominated in that positions of authority – political, economic, legal, religious, educational, military, domestic – are generally reserved for men’, it is ‘male identified in that core cultural ideas about what is considered good, desirable, preferable, or normal are culturally associated with how we think about men, manhood, and masculinity’, it is ‘male centered, which means that the focus of attention is primarily on men and boys and what they do’, and so it becomes a ‘pumped-­up world of winners and losers’ where women, by their very biological definition, will always lose (2014: 6, 7, 10, 13, original emphases). As we continue to read Silko’s text within Coulthard’s conceptualization of a grounded normativity predicated upon ‘reciprocal relations and obligation’, then Almanac’s depiction of the gendered hierarchies of contemporary Western patriarchal systems becomes deeply troubling, especially when the natural world itself is gendered female and thus explicitly constructed as violable and exploitable. As Patrick Murphy has commented, ‘patriarchy [has] throughout its historical manifestations . . . placed both women and nature in the category of the absolute and alienated other’ (1995: 35). Here, Almanac carefully reflects its extra-­textual world, and demonstrates clearly that there are entrenched and ingrained systemic problems to overcome if we want to mend and alter our damaged and damaging relationships with one another and with the Earth. This, Almanac suggests, simply cannot happen within a patriarchal system of oppression, control and violence; and so Silko’s reader is returned, once again, to the driving force of the text: the idea of systemic ‘Revolucíon’. And, of course, this return, this revolving, this revolution, is not only entirely appropriate but is, importantly, presented to Silko’s reader in exactly the same ways that capitalism and patriarchy construct and present themselves. In the textual world of Almanac, therefore, ‘Revolucíon’ is to be understood as both natural and inevitable. Once again, Silko’s reader is confronted with the realization that Almanac’s infamous prediction of the ‘disappearance of all things European’ can also be interpreted as the overturning of the patriarchal worldviews that oppress 50 per cent of the world’s human population, and all of its non-­human populations (1991: map legend). As with the discussion of capitalism in the previous chapter, what we see within Almanac’s depiction of patriarchy are the ways in which the consolidation of power via violent forms of control impacts upon both human bodies and the natural world. Almanac’s representation of powerful forms of ingrained patriarchal misogyny is most evident in its graphic and often disturbing depictions of how male power is maintained via a series of institutionalized forms of policing and control that depend upon violent enforcement, and often simply upon individual or communal acts of violence. Almanac therefore engages with the extra-­textual prejudice, oppression and violence that all women experience – and, for the twenty-­first-century reader, that women continue to experience – in every global patriarchal culture.

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Within Almanac’s brutal patriarchal systems, we witness graphic representations of violence against human bodies and the natural world. Violence is everywhere, emphasized by the extensive drug trafficking, gun-­ running, and political and personal assassinations of the text. Violent deaths saturate the story through suicide, homicide, infanticide and genocide. Human bodies are bought and sold through prostitution and strip clubs, blood and organ trafficking, and the trafficking and exploitation of illegal immigrants. Human bodies inflict and suffer abuse through the acts of sexual violence evident in Almanac’s tales of rape, bestiality, paedophilia and pornography. Human bodies are literally taken apart and consumed, both for profit and for entertainment and enjoyment, through cannibalism, ‘snuff ’ movies, and the ever-­growing ‘market’ for videos showing torture, violent sexual assault, ‘sex change’ surgeries, female circumcisions, abortions, and foetal experiments and dissections. Everywhere in Silko’s text are examples of the ways in which elite male groups, capitalist and corporate interests, and patriarchal institutions collaborate to retain control through an enactment of violence, including via the racist heritage of genetic research, the underlying misogyny of patriarchal reproductive research, and the careless and potentially fatal damage done to the natural world by patriarchy, capitalism, science, technology and industry. Above all, Almanac’s consideration of patriarchy can be retrospectively read through Johnson’s suggestion that ‘[p]atriarchy is grounded in a Great Lie that the answer to life’s needs is disconnection, competition, and control, rather than connection, sharing, and cooperation’ (2014: 52). In other words, Almanac’s patriarchal structures, and those characters who choose to participate in and benefit from those structures, operate in direct opposition to the kinds of ‘connection’, ‘sharing’ and ‘cooperation’ that are at the heart of the reciprocal relations and obligations essential to the conceptualization – and, crucially, to the practice – of grounded normativity. Indeed, Murphy has argued that the absolute alienation of women and the natural world within patriarchal cultures ‘attests to a continuing [patriarchal] refusal to recognize reciprocity as a ubiquitous natural/cultural process’ (1995: 35, emphasis added). It is notable that, in direct contrast to the reciprocity intrinsic to grounded normativity, the patriarchal processes of Almanac are absolutely dependent upon separation and violence: upon the kinds of slow violence evident within the insidious, elided and naturalized representations of both women and the natural world as ‘things’ to be exploited, possessed and controlled; and upon the more visible individual, collective and institutional acts of specific (often graphic) violence that punctuate and saturate Silko’s text as powerful examples of the exertion of patriarchal control. Accordingly, Almanac’s two inter-­related forms of patriarchal violence can be very profitably read within Sylvia Walby’s contention that there are two main forms of patriarchy, the ‘private’– the subordination and control of individual women by individual men – and the ‘public’ – the collective subordination and control of women by social, national and international institutions and systems (1990: 24).

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In his exploration of patriarchy, Johnson has stated that the majority of twenty-­first-century Western cultures exist ‘deep inside an oppressive gender legacy whose consequences in a male dominated world extend far beyond relations between women and men, from runaway capitalist greed and class inequality to the impending devastation of climate change’ (2014: 5). Here, Johnson drew direct comparisons between institutionalized gender hierarchies and institutionalized ecological hierarchies, and so engages unmistakably with the concerns of ecofeminism. This is especially evident in Johnson’s consideration of the ways in which both gender and ecological hierarchies are enforced and policed through the institutionalization of control and violence within capitalist patriarchy. At the heart of ecofeminist theory is an understanding that, as Murphy has noted, ‘the domination and oppression of women and nature are inextricably intertwined’ because ‘patriarchal ideology . . . generates the sexual metaphors of masculine domination of nature’ (1995: 48); that, as Maria Mies and Shiva Vandana have stated, women have long been ‘treated like “nature”, devoid of rationality, their bodies functioning in the same instinctive way as other mammals’, with the result that ‘[l]ike nature they could be oppressed, exploited and dominated by man’ (2014: xxiii). As Patricia Fara has commented, gender oppression is written into the very fabric of the powerful discourses of botanical science via Carl Linnaeus’s ‘mapping’ of ‘human society onto the botanical world’ within his paradigm-­changing scientific classification system. In this way, Linnaeus thus ‘proved’ that ‘since sexual hierarchies prevail in nature, male supremacy must also . . . be appropriate for people’; a sleight of hand that, Fara argues, ‘conveniently forgets how this sexual ordering was inferred [by Linnaeus himself] from society in the first place’ (2003: 22). In a patriarchal world in which violence is inseparable from power, and control must be exerted over those who are ‘subordinate’ or ‘subordinated’, Val Plumwood has noted that it is no accident that it is precisely this ‘mapping of a gender hierarchy onto the nature/culture distinction [that] has been a major culprit in the destruction of the biosphere’, and that ‘the treatment of nature can [and should] be thought of in political terms as well as ethical terms’ (1993: 10, 2, emphasis added). As twenty-­first-century ecofeminist criticism contends, the oppression of women within both patriarchal and capitalist systems coupled with the gendering of the natural world as female, can only result in the domination and subjugation of both. There are, therefore, indisputable connections between patriarchy’s oppression of women and its oppression of the natural world, not only within Almanac’s pages but in the extra-­textual world more widely. And these connections suggest that patriarchy is not only driven by gender oppression and inequalities but itself drives ‘the worldviews that threaten the stable evolution of the biosphere, in which human beings participate or perish’ (Murphy 1995: 48). Through the privileging of male over female, patriarchal culture is, at its very core, a system of profound and disturbing imbalance; and Murphy’s contention, that we either participate or perish, thus reiterates – and

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is itself reiterated by – Johnson’s assertion that our promotion and pursuit of disconnection, competition and control is at the direct expense of the kinds of connection, sharing and cooperation that are essential to interlinked human and environmental wellbeing. These kinds of gendered and ecological analyses are, therefore, of particular significance not only to Almanac’s consideration of the workings of institutionalized patriarchal violence, but also to the ways in which violence against women is inextricable from the violences directed against the natural world via the powerful institutionalized and ‘naturalized’ hierarchies that govern everyday human lives in the majority of global societies. As Johnson observes, ‘control is an essential element of patriarchy: men maintain their privilege by controlling’ and ‘[v]iolence is an instrument of [that] control’, with the result that ‘patriarchy not only makes men’s violence inevitable but roots it in an obsession with control that extends far beyond individual men who engage in acts of violence’ (2014: 13, 46–7). Crucially, this male obsession with male control, enacted via a range of often highly creative forms of violence, is profoundly evident in Silko’s novel. This chapter will, accordingly, first explore the ways in which patriarchal power is established and consolidated via the construction of gendered and sexualized hierarchies, before considering the ways that power and control operate through individual, collective and systemic violence. In these last two related sections, I will begin by assessing the kinds of individual, collective and systemic violence shown to women, and then move on the explore how that misogynistic violence translates into a range of violences directed at the natural world.

Almanac’s exclusive homosociality The connection between woman and natural world, the violences shown to both by patriarchal systems, and the increasing disconnection of a range of influential ‘patriarchs’ within Silko’s text are demonstrated via Almanac’s constructions of social and sexual interactions. Here, I hesitate to use the term ‘relationships’, since that would imply a connection that suggests the involvement of emotion. Rather, what we see within Almanac’s profoundly patriarchal worlds are a series of ‘transactions’ and ‘exchanges’, an extension of an emotionless and loveless vampire capitalism. Here, the textual individuals and social groups are saturated and overwhelmed by the kinds of emotional disconnection and void that are required by, and are perhaps prerequisite of, patriarchal culture. What we see, then, with Almanac’s ‘patriarchs’ is a reiteration of St Clair’s argument that Silko’s novel is demonstrative of a ‘death of love’ in the late twentieth century, that is itself dependent upon the violence evident in a ‘love of death’ (1996: 141). This is perhaps unsurprising given that, as Nils Hammerén argued, our ‘concepts of love and intimacy have become feminized’ within patriarchal culture, making the very notion of love or emotion as abhorrent as the female bodies within Almanac’s profoundly patriarchal world

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(Hammerén and Johannson 2014: 5). In Silko’s novel, we are shown that it is the kind of violent control with which patriarchal culture is obsessed that demands the level of dissociation and disconnection required for the success of a society built upon a ‘death of love’ and a ‘love of death’. This overwhelming dissociation and disconnection is profoundly evident within Almanac’s powerful male social groups, where increasingly brutal male homosocial transactions maintain a distinct imbalance through a calculated erasure of female presence. Indeed, what we are shown is the logical conclusion of a deliberately imbalanced and wilfully blinkered emphasis upon disconnection, competition and control. It is perhaps unsurprising that Almanac’s elite and powerful male vampire capitalists are also its textual ‘patriarchs’; while they benefit from the oppressive workings of capitalism, they benefit equally from the oppressive operations of systemic patriarchy. Characters such as Beaufrey, Serlo and David, Max Blue and his sons Sonny and Bingo, Menardo, Trigg, Mr Greenlee and Mr B, General J. and the Mexican police chief, Judge Arne and the Senator, and groups such as the local Tucson police force and the Mexican military, plus additional characters such as Ferro and Paulie, all fully exploit their status as men within a patriarchal system that venerates biological and cultural masculinity and despises femininity and female bodies. While originally only acting as an identifier for the male head of a family, it is notable that the term ‘patriarch’ has become subsequently enshrined not only within our cultural histories, but also within our cultural systems. A ‘patriarch’ is, by definition, a leading figure in religious traditions; a representative of his specific cultural or social group; a figure of ‘authority’, and a leader within a patriarchal system. Incorporated within the term is the Greek term archos, or ‘ruler’: a patriarch is, therefore, a man who rules, who – by definition – dominates. And this is powerfully evident in the behaviour of Almanac’s patriarchs, who operate in a world built so all-­ encompassingly on male cultural values that any suggestion of the female or the feminine must be oppressed, repressed, preferably eliminated. The majority of Almanac’s male characters are deeply implicated in the patriarchal systems of the text, and all are either already utterly committed to the promise of unlimited autocratic male power or quickly won over to its potential. Silko’s reader soon becomes aware that Almanac’s male characters participate because ‘[t]o have power over and be prepared to use it is culturally defined as good and desirable (and characteristically male), and to lack such power or to be reluctant to use it is seen as weak if not contemptible (and characteristically female)’ (Johnson 2014: 37). In addition to buoying their social and political privilege, the majority of Almanac’s patriarchs participate because either they openly despise women and actively enjoy subjugating the female characters, or they get a sexualized satisfaction from competing with their male rivals. The number of male characters who despise their absent, reluctant or disturbingly emotionally detached mothers – the subject of the next section – is almost overwhelming, and this intimate and domestic hatred is shown to be the root cause of a larger, systemic misogyny. Of the mother who admits she ‘tried to abort’ him, Beaufrey

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declares that he ‘had started by hating his mother; hating the rest of them was easy’ and that, although he ‘ignored women’, he nonetheless ‘enjoyed conversations that upset or degraded them’ (1991: 102); left by his birth mother Lecha to be reluctantly raised by her sister Zeta, Ferro calls his mother Lecha ‘that . . . thing’ and states that he ‘hates Lecha above all others’ with a hatred that consumes ‘all his being’ (1991: 187, 19, 183, original emphasis); cynically manipulated within Leah Blue’s real estate transactions from a young age, her son Sonny states that he ‘did not call her Mother’ and that he teaches his younger brother Bingo ‘to call her Leah and not Mama’ because ‘they were not wanted’ (1991: 434, 435, 439); and, abandoned by his mother to his grandfather’s sexual abuse, Serlo refuses to associate with women, who he identifies as ‘defect[ive]’ and ‘vampir[ic]’ (1991: 541). What is perhaps most notable about these male-­focused textual societies is their overwhelming emphasis on the homosocial; on the ways that ‘privilege and oppression are organized through [male] social relationships and unequal distributions of power, rewards, opportunities, and resources’ (Johnson 2014: 39). Here, Silko’s novel unashamedly echoes and replicates the extra-­textual 1980s world of its composition, to depict a male-­dominated capitalist world predicated upon disconnection, competition and control. Here, greed is not only good, it is literally the only goal; and Silko’s readers are shown the results of a world built and reliant upon imbalance. This is a world in which all significant transactions are between men, where all decisions are made by men for the benefit of men; where women are excluded and increasingly considered an irrelevance. In this profoundly patriarchal world, then, the homosocial becomes all-­consuming because, as Johnson argues, ‘patriarchy puts issues of power, dominance, and control at the center of human existence’ (2014: 40). While all of the textual ‘patriarchs’ exhibit a powerful desire to control, it is Beaufrey who most perfectly embodies Johnson’s description of the ways in which control operates in patriarchal systems: To control something, we have to see it as a separate ‘other’. . . . As a result, controllers come to see themselves as subjects who intend and decide what will happen and see others as objects to act upon. The controlled are seen without the fullness and complexity that define them as human beings. They have no history, no dimensions to give them any depth or command the controllers’ attention or understanding except when it interferes with control. (2014: 14)

As we have already seen, Beaufrey’s complete dissociation from others is clearly stated in his observation that ‘others did not fully exist’, and this is primarily because he ‘knew that only he could truly feel or truly suffer’ (1991: 533). Johnson further specified that patriarchal control operates ‘not only in relationships between men and women, but among men as they compete and struggle to gain status, maintain control, and protect themselves from what

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other men might do to them’ (2014: 40, emphasis added). Almanac’s textual homosociality can here be very productively read through the lens of Eve Sedgwick’s influential study of male homosocial desire. Sedgwick suggested that, rather than simply connoting the ‘social bonds between persons of the same [biological] sex’ that are built within patriarchal societies on a ‘hegemonic’ form of masculinity most usually ‘characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality’, homosociality can instead be read as part of ‘a continuum [that runs] between homosocial and homosexual’ which, within contemporary patriarchal cultures, is ‘radically disrupted’ and actively obscured (1985: 696, emphasis added). As Nils Hammerén and Thomas Johansson have argued, this suggests that there is ‘an underlying continuum between different kinds of male homosocial desires’; including, at its simplest levels, ‘vertical’ or ‘hierarchical’ homosociality that is marked by the ways in which ‘men tend to bond, build closed teams, and defend their privileges and positions’ whose operations are ‘based on and formed through competition and exclusion’ (2014: 2, 1, 3). While Hammerén and Johansson pointed to more complex interpretations of homosociality that include more nuanced ‘horizontal’ inter-­ relations, it is clear that the homosociality that saturates Almanac’s text is profoundly hierarchical and works in conjunction with the text’s patriarchal systems. Accordingly, Almanac’s homosociality becomes confused with and inseparable from all other forms of male transaction and exchange, including business operations, political and legal associations, and sexual interactions. As Almanac’s powerful male figures become extreme illustrations of patriarchy’s veneration of the male and male relationships, and its abhorrence and abuse of the female and of female bodies, the homosocial in the text is thus shown to be part of the kind of ‘unbroke[n] . . . continuum’ that Sedgwick pointed to, as it merges with a series of transactions and exchanges that we might, at least initially, tentatively term ‘homosexual’ (1985: 696). And so we turn to the most controversial element of Silko’s novel, Almanac’s depiction of ‘homosexuality’. While both critics and readers alike were repelled by the copious examples of violence and excess in Silko’s text on its publication, it is safe to say that many found the textual emphasis on ‘homosexuality’ to be the most disturbing, not least because there are a disproportionate number of ‘homosexual’ characters (the vast majority of the male characters engage in same-­sex sexual acts), and almost all are depicted as textual villains. Many readers, therefore, identified the text as outrageously prejudiced, and there are a range of critical responses and online reader reviews that make just this point.2 As Gene Lyons argued in his review in Entertainment Weekly, ‘much of the narrative concentrates in considerable – one might even say loving – detail upon European penchants for dope-­snorting, murder and buggery. Especially buggery. Judging by the number and variety of gay villains in Almanac of the Dead, Silko seems more than a little homophobic’ (1991). It is fair to say that the majority of both readers and critics have shied away from discussing Silko’s representations of sexuality in any detail. And this is a clear problem because,

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although the textual ‘homosexuality’ is overt and problematic, it is without a doubt a central feature of the text’s politics. Yet the majority of scholars to date have avoided any detailed critical discussion, in large part because of the challenging politics of engaging with the subject. This is so glaring a gap in the scholarship that Dorothea Fischer-Hornung’s timely and exceptionally astute 2007 critical analysis of Almanac’s ‘gay men’ not only surveyed the limited critical engagement with what she termed ‘Silko’s exceedingly uncomfortable depiction of homosexuality’, but commented further that it is the very nature of Silko’s depiction that has led to ‘so much critical hemming and hawing’ (2014: 75, 76).3 It is, therefore, undeniable that Almanac’s construction of ‘homosexuality’ plays a central a role in reader bewilderment, and that ‘homosexuality’ as it is deployed in the text is fundamental to Silko’s analysis of the late twentieth century. Accordingly, this study will here consider Silko’s deployment in some detail. Given the extent of both reader and critical bewilderment, it is perhaps useful to begin with a consideration of the links and disjunctions between the homosocial and the homosexual, of the confusions between the two in readings of Silko’s novel, and of the complex and mutable histories of the term ‘homosexual’ itself. This, as Johnson noted ‘only a century or so ago in Europe and the United States . . . was a term that described behaviour but not people: people could behave in homosexual ways, but this did not make them homosexuals’ (2014: 20, emphasis added). And it is notable that the majority of the powerful male textual characters who engage in same-­sex sex acts explicitly refute a homosexual identity. Certainly, Trigg sees his acts of same-­sex sexual activity, discussed in the last chapter, simply as successful economic transactions (1991: 444); and, Judge Arne openly comments that he ‘did not consider himself homosexual. . . . In classical times it had not been necessary to talk about contact between men. Contact was action, and action was behavior. Behavior was not identity’ (1991: 645, emphasis added). Here, Arne seems to equate both ‘contact’ and ‘action’ with a powerful sense of patriarchal masculinity, and he goes on to comment that, in terms of sexuality and sexual activity, ‘[h]e did not think gender really mattered; sex after all was only a bodily function, a kind of expulsion of the sex fluids into some receptacle or another’ (1991: 657). Given these comments, it is perhaps no surprise that Judge Arne indulges in sexual activity with his bloodhounds, where he is guaranteed to enjoy a ‘deliriously potent’ orgasm due to his absolute control of the sexual transaction (1991: 658). And, even though Serlo is sexually abused by his grandfather, that same grandfather teaches him that he does ‘not consider . . . [this to be] homosexuality’, with the result that Serlo ‘considered himself heterosexual’ despite his avoidance of penetrative sex of any kind (Beaufrey declares him to be ‘asexual’) and the ‘repulsi[on]’ he feels for the sexual ‘stink’ of women (1991: 546, 552, 564). In the early twenty-­first century, our growing recognition of a wide continuum of sexual behaviour and sexual desire means that the homosocial and the homosexual cannot be equated, either extra-­textually or within Silko’s novel.

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And yet, paradoxically, this growing recognition is coupled with our internalization and redeployment of more dated and firmly fixed sexual categories. The result is that Almanac’s mutable and ever-­shifting sexual categories and power hierarchies make it both difficult and often confusing to read. In the wake of Freudian theories of sexuality that impact on every aspect of our daily lives, of influential Foucauldian readings of constructed sexualities, of the hard and only partially won international battle for rights by LGBT groups, and of the battles still being fought around the globe against entrenched homophobia, it is difficult to associate the origins of the term ‘homosexual’ with our contemporary understandings of it as a term related solely to sexual identity and sexual orientation. In reading Almanac’s bewildering sexual worlds, we therefore need to address some of the very real extra-­textual complexities that have been identified by Carole S. Vance, including the problems that are posed by the ‘instability of sexual categories’ (1985: 164). Vance’s additional extra-­ textual arguments are equally valid to a successful reading of Almanac: and so, as readers, we need to recognize our tendency towards a ‘false universalism’ in the context of sexualities and sexual behaviours; and we need to acknowledge that ‘it may be more appropriate to speak of “same-­sex” rather than “homosexual” acts or relations’ (1985: 164–5). This is not easy to achieve as our desire to universalize – falsely, Vance would argue – sexuality and sexual behaviour is embedded within the very language we use, reflected in the primary dictionary definition of ‘homosexual’ as ‘sexual desire toward another of the same sex’, with ‘desire’ itself identified as an overwhelming ‘craving’ or ‘coveting’ based on emotions and/or love. Yet, in the loveless and emotionless world of Silko’s text, few of the male characters engaging in same-­sex sex acts express this popularly accepted understanding of desire; the majority simply exhibit cravings and a covetousness linked to greed, accumulation and power rather than to love. These are cravings that are overpoweringly derived from, and feed back into, the workings and systems of vampire capitalism and patriarchal hierarchy. Certainly, none of Almanac’s ‘patriarchs’ embrace the related philosophical aspects of desire: what Timothy Schroeder has identified as ‘intentions, caring, love, emotions’ and what one might expect, therefore, from a committed and loving sexual relationship regardless of sexual orientation (2010: 364). As a result, the male same-­sex sexual acts in Almanac are almost never acts of love, and the majority of the powerful male characters whom one might tentatively identify as ‘homosexual’ because of their sexual behaviour show no love for – nor any capacity to love – their sexual partners. It is notable that Beaufrey, for instance, ‘did not allow himself to be . . . embraced or touched’, and so always has sex fully clothed while wearing ‘one [condom] over another’ (1991: 552, original emphasis). Despite his claims that this is ‘for added [sexual] safety’, Beaufrey’s doubling of the condoms he uses can also be read as a desire for dissociation, as an obsession with maintaining distance in even the most intimate of human acts (1991: 552). Notably, this physical and sexual dissociation is equally evident in the male

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characters that most readers tend to identify as ‘heterosexual’, and so we see that, although Max Blue survived an assassination attempt that is a key example of Almanac’s ‘love of death’, he has as a direct result ‘lost all connection with the world’, with the result that ‘nothing . . . excited him [sexually] anymore’ and he ‘did not like to be touched or to touch others’ (1991: 353, 378, 436). The extreme dissociation shown by both Beaufrey and Max is clearly reflective of the textual patriarchal system, which aptly demonstrates Johnson’s subsequent contention that ‘the more that men participate in the [patriarchal] system, the more likely they are to see themselves as . . . disconnected from others’ (2014: 14). The male same-­sex sexual interactions of the text are therefore presented simply as transactions, where there is no understanding of, nor even any attempt at, relationship. The sole exception is Eric, whose capacity for love ensures that he cannot survive in Almanac’s loveless world, resulting in a ‘despair’ that overwhelms him and leads to his suicide (1991: 106). As St Clair has commented, Eric is ‘victimized for and by his capacity to love’, subsequently ‘destroyed and devoured’ by the text’s ‘cannibal queers’, many of whom she persuasively asserts ‘are not even strictly homosexual’ but ‘sexually use whomever they wish to consume’ (1999: 208). Here, it is timely to recall Trigg’s deployment of fellatio as a ‘payment’ for his consumption of male bodies discussed in the last chapter: while technically ‘homosexual’ because the sexual acts are exclusively male, this is nonetheless the behaviour of a male character who self-­identifies as heterosexual and who views the act itself as a capitalist transaction (1991: 444). I would agree, therefore, with both St Clair and Fischer-Hornung’s interpretations that something more complex is going on here than simple homophobic representations; and that, troubling, problematic and bewildering though those representations might be, they speak far more directly to patriarchal and capitalist homosociality than they do to homosexuality as it has been defined since the late twentieth century. Eric’s fate seems woven into this interpretation of Almanac’s dangerously imbalanced and loveless homosociality. Surrounded by ‘cannibal queers’ whose sexual consumption is both voracious and indiscriminate, Eric’s capacity for love, and his very real sexual and emotional desire for David, is evident in his ‘three-­page’ suicide note, which is in reality a despairing love letter to David that reveals how he is broken by his ‘feverish . . . love and need’ that is never returned (1991: 107). If we apply current dictionary definitions and popular extra-­textual understandings here to our reading, then it is Eric’s capacity for love and his desire for a meaningful and loving sexual relationship that identifies him as the only truly ‘homosexual’ character in the text. As Eric himself painfully realizes, ‘[h]e was the odd man out’ (1991: 52). Out of place within a world where male same-­sex sex acts are seen as transactions, as exchanges, as forms of control, and as the means to achieve and maintain patriarchal social status and power, Eric simply cannot survive. This realization is underscored if we compare Eric to his sexual partner David, who sees Eric’s suicide only in terms of profit: as a convenient stepping stone to ‘launc[h] his [photographic] career’, and to ensure the commercial value of his

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own ‘art’ photographs of Eric’s dead body (1991: 554). Seeing only the potential commercial profit of Eric’s violent death, David takes his time lighting the scene of Eric’s suicide to ensure the most effective contrast between Eric’s blood ‘as bright and glossy as enamel paint’ and the ‘bright white of the chenille bedspread’ (1991: 108, 107). Eric’s naked body is dehumanized against a bloody ‘field of peonies and poppies – cherry, ruby, deep purple, black’, with the result that David’s ‘Police Gazette style’ images of the death scene erase both the brutal violence of Eric’s death and the reality of his human life (1991: 108, 106). Within Almanac’s loveless worlds, it is no coincidence that David’s images subsequently achieve both critical and commercial success. And it is somehow both ironic and, for Silko’s reader, disturbingly satisfying that Beaufrey deliberately profits in the almost exact same way from David’s own accidental death. In Beaufrey’s calculations, David is ‘worth more dead than alive’, and his own images of David’s own violent death and broken body ensure that the ‘Eric series [of images] would appreciate in value’ while bringing in a little profit themselves (1991: 565). Here, Beaufrey’s desire for monetary profit is linked equally to his desire for, and to the sexual arousal and satisfaction he derives from, the elaborate ‘game’ in which he ‘permit[s] gorgeous young men like David to misunderstand their importance in the world’ before ‘watching the[m] . . . break down’ as they are made to realize their insignificance, and so ‘waltz . . . closer to suicide’ (1991: 537, 560, 550). It is notable that, on discovering David’s ‘battered corpse’, Beaufrey ‘was grinning’ (1991: 565). If we accept the definition of ‘desire’ as an overwhelming craving or coveting, then Almanac’s homosocial characters do indeed demonstrate desire, albeit a decidedly patriarchal and capitalist form of desire. As Sedgwick has noted, desire does not connote ‘a particular affective state or emotion’ but rather an ‘affective or social force’ whose sexual nature remains ‘an active question’ (1985: 697, emphasis added). Via a series of male same-­sex sexual transactions, it soon becomes abundantly clear that these are not acts of love, rather they are acts that demonstrate what is most desired: the enactment and achievement of power via the control and subjugation of others. And the reader’s mind here returns, reluctantly but inevitably, to the scenes between Judge Arne and his basset hounds, which echo and replay the manufactured, carefully maintained and culturally sanctioned hierarchies between the human and the non-­human. Importantly, as Sedgwick’s comments suggest, these male same-­sex sexual transactions are also representative of powerful social forces that demonstrate patriarchy’s profound reliance upon disconnection, competition and control. As the exclusively male sexual and non-­sexual transactions already discussed suggest, the homosocial becomes all-­consuming in Almanac as powerful male textual figures become illustrations of patriarchy’s veneration of the male and of male transactions, and its abhorrence and abuse of the female and of female bodies. If, as Johnson argues, ‘men maintain their privilege’ in patriarchal systems not only ‘by controlling . . . other men who might threaten’ that privilege but also by ‘controlling women’, then we can see that there is a direct relationship

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between the exclusively homosocial transactions just discussed and the wider transactions between Almanac’s patriarchs and the female characters (2014: 13). Emerging from and influenced by an exclusive homosociality, the transactions between Almanac’s male and female characters expose the fundamentally male-­focused principle that governs the male–female power dynamic in patriarchal systems where men are also subject to the same hierarchical structures. It is notable that, even as a young child, Leah and Max’s eldest son Sonny participates enthusiastically in a patriarchal hierarchy that allows him to dominate and subjugate his younger brother Bingo, gaining ‘pleasure’ from ‘seeing him cry’ and attempting to make Bingo ‘his slave’ (1991: 439, 439). Through examples such as this, Almanac clearly shows us that children are educated and absorbed into such patriarchal systems at a very early stage, as one of the ways in which the system naturalizes itself. It is important to note that, in such systems,‘men are allowed to dominate women as compensation for being subordinated to other men’ (Johnson 2014: 13, 58, emphasis added). And Silko’s text bluntly shows us what the inevitable and undeniable outcome of this kind of patriarchal gender domination is: the manufactured irrelevance and attempted eradication of the female.

‘Rape culture’ and sexualized violence The profound hatred and contempt shown to the female characters by the majority of Almanac’s patriarchs is disturbingly echoed by the profound disconnection shown by a range of mothers within the text. What one sees most clearly in these examples are the ways in which the disconnection, competition and control demanded by the patriarchal system impacts inescapably upon the female characters of the text. And so we see a disconcerting negation of the kinds of nurturing and loving relationship one might expect to see between mothers and children, as the female characters also accept – consciously or unconsciously – the degradation of female social and cultural roles. While this might be what Silko’s reader has come to expect in a textual world that has eliminated the possibility of love or of loving relationships, this is nonetheless so fundamental a bond that has been broken that it makes for very uncomfortable reading. We are therefore shown a range of ‘bad’ mothers, some of whom I have already touched upon: Beaufrey’s mother, who tried unsuccessfully to self-­abort her child (1991:102); Lecha, who walked out on her newborn son Ferro at just ‘a week old’ (1991: 19), and Lecha’s twin sister Zeta, who raised Ferro but made it clear this was ‘not . . . out of maternal love but out of duty’ (1991: 183); Leah Blue, who cynically exploited her sons and who ‘never . . . come[s]’ to comfort Bingo after his violent and recurrent childhood nightmares (1991: 439); and Serlo’s permanently absent mother who left him with an abusive grandfather. But we are also shown a range of other ineffective or neglectful mothers: Trigg’s lawyer mother, who is described as ‘alcoholic’ and makes excuses not to visit

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him after the drink-­drive accident that leaves him paralysed (1991: 384); Root’s socially elite mother, who cannot accept his irreparable brain damage as a result of a near fatal motorcycle accident, and instead ‘pray[ed] he would die in a coma’ despite the medical assurances that Root ‘still has an IQ only a few points below the genius level’ (1991: 200, 206); and Sterling’s mother-­substitute Old Aunt Marie, who is helpless to protect or defend him when he is exiled by the Laguna Tribal Council, an event that cannot be prevented even by the communal ‘shame’ caused by her own resulting death (1991: 97). And we are shown how Lecha and Zeta’s Yaqui grandmother, Yoeme, is condemned as an ‘unfit’ mother by a patriarchal Euro-American system that ignores her forced marriage to ‘[t]he fucker Guzman’ yet condemns her abandonment of her mixed-­race children (1991: 116). Perhaps the most powerful representation of the unsuitable mother is Seese, who, addicted to cocaine and alcohol and trapped in a loveless sexual transaction with David, ‘loses’ their newborn son Monte to a successful kidnap attempt by Beaufrey and David, and spends the entire text unsuccessfully searching for him. The story of Seese’s motherhood is perhaps the most poignant and disturbing, as the reader becomes aware that Beaufrey has subsequently organized for Monte to be murdered as part of his own sexualized psychological power ‘game’ with David, ‘because nothing got Beaufrey hotter than pumping away at an unsuspecting arsehole’ (1991: 561). The conclusion of Beaufrey’s power game, showing David the record of his son’s death on video and in photographs, thus has two purposes: to provoke David’s own suicide; and, perhaps appropriately, to make a profit from Monte’s murder, dismemberment and organ-­harvesting that has been recorded so it can to be distributed to Beaufrey’s established market of ‘connoisseurs’ and ‘collectors’ (1991: 102). Set uncomfortably against this reader knowledge, Seese’s continued hope for Monte’s return and her repeatedly stated maternal love for him acts to further expose the denaturalization and disruption of mother–child relationships within Almanac’s patriarchal world. Here, Silko again engages with the extra-­ textual world in which Almanac was composed, and the assaults upon motherhood within the text can be read as reflections of the powerful assaults upon motherhood and ‘unfit mothers’ within the culture wars of Reagan’s America in the 1980s. While these attacks were directed against a range of mothers deemed ‘unfit’, there was especial popular moral outrage – and subsequently state policies – directed against mothers who used drugs. As Sheigla Murphy and Paloma Sales have argued, while many drug-­using mothers in the 1980s reported that ‘drug use helped them overcome some of the adversities in their daily lives’ and was ‘a source of solace’, such women nonetheless ‘faced severe consequences’ as the Reagan administration began to depict poor, drug-­using women as ‘dysfunctional’ because their moral ‘values . . . differed from those of mainstream Americans’ (2001). The creation of the stereotype of the ‘Welfare Queen’ in this era to mark ‘undeserving’ poor black women who became mothers ‘in order to collect welfare’, was soon adapted by both the media and the Reagan administration to incorporate the additional

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‘unfit’ drug-­abusing mothers who produced ‘crack babies’ (2001). This, Murphy and Sales argued, bore little relationship to any medical or other evidence and was created specifically to ‘scapegoat’ vulnerable women (2001). As Denise Paone and Julie Alperen have suggested, there was a deliberate campaign of ‘pregnancy policing’ during the Reagan years, with ‘an unprecedented backlash against’ pregnant drug users, who were characterized as ‘immoral and unfit’ despite there being ‘tenuous [scientific and sociological] data’ (1998: 101). Paone and Alperen thus concluded that the resulting ‘campaign to punish [such] women’ was ‘plagued with racial and gender bias’ (1998: 101). Government policy was accompanied and supported by virulent and vicious media campaigns of such long-­lasting effect that commentators such as A. M. Rosenthal in the New York Times could, in the middle of the next decade, still claim that ‘thousands of American babies’ are ‘[f]rom their first breath . . . abused children’ who have been ‘poisoned in the womb by their own mothers’, and that those same mothers will ‘poison one child, poison another, keep them all: one of the liberties permitted by American culture and law’ (1996: 17, emphasis added). In both textual and extra-­textual patriarchal systems, it would therefore seem that that ‘liberty’ itself is gendered. For Silko’s reader, the prejudice and ingrained misogyny of these extra-­ textual social and systemic attitudes reverberate uneasily and uncomfortably. Indeed, they are reflected within the profound misogyny directed at Almanac’s female characters. For instance, it is ‘made clear’ to the grieving and confused Seese by the ‘faces of the deputies’ who attend to investigate Monte’s disappearance, that the cocaine and champagne she has consumed to help her cope with her loss mark her as a ‘bad’ mother (1991: 104). While the reader is clearly shown that Seese had limited her drug use while pregnant and that Monte ‘had not been born addicted’, in the view of the male police officers – and so in the view of the patriarchal system more generally – ‘the blame had been pinned on Seese’ herself (1991: 111, 104). Indeed, once the police are aware that the abductor might be David, Monte’s father, they ‘lost interest’ in what they identify as a ‘domestic incident’ (1991: 110). While this clearly shows the ways in which the male characters such as David and Beaufrey are able to operate outside of the law within the patriarchal system of the text, it is notable that this occurs in conjunction with – and so is both implicitly and explicitly linked to – the ‘contempt’ that Seese is shown by the police officers who act as judge and jury to decide that she ‘had got what she deserved’ as an unfit mother (1991: 111). Here, indeed, we see the ways in which Walby’s ‘private’ and ‘public’ forms of patriarchy collide and collude to support and enable one another (1990: 24). And so it also becomes clear that the repressive patriarchal system we see in Silko’s text has very real connections to the extra-­textual patriarchal worlds in which we still find ourselves several decades later. Shown Seese’s drug and alcohol use as a coping mechanism, and recognizing and understanding the circumstances that have led her to her actions, as readers we are also forced to acknowledge that the value judgements made about women within Almanac

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are uncomfortably similar to those that continue to be made in our own extra-­ textual twenty-­first-century worlds. These patriarchal value judgements – both textual and extra-­textual – are inevitably saturated with misogyny since, as Johnson has noted, ‘there is no escaping misogyny, because. . . . [i]t is part of patriarchal culture’ (2014: 60, emphasis added). Reading Almanac within the context of grounded normativity, it is of real textual and extra-­textual concern that this deep-­rooted misogyny is a direct result of the disconnection, competition and control that drives patriarchal systems and is dependent upon subjugation and imbalance. Silko takes pains to make her reader aware of the ways in which her text reflects its extra-­textual context, and so the extent of the misogyny within Almanac should give us pause for thought as readers; not least because very little has changed in the two decades and more since Almanac was published. Accordingly, we need to consider the extent of global misogyny in the early twenty-­first century, and to acknowledge that – as we see in the world of Almanac – the oppression of 50 per cent of the world’s populations could not happen without the collusion, conscious or unconscious, of the other 50 per cent. As with capitalism, one of the key problems with patriarchy is that it is invisible and insidious, and we tend to identify its problems – the subjugation of women, misogyny, male violence against women – with individuals, as opposed to with the system itself. Although Johnson noted that ‘there is no escaping misogyny’, this is not because it is an individual ‘personality flaw’ but rather because it is a key ‘part’ both of the patriarchal system and, perhaps even more importantly, of ‘patriarchal culture[s]’ (2014: 60). Even when we do identify the system or the culture as a problem, patriarchal ideology ensures that we cannot offer an effective challenge because, as Sheila Rowbotham has commented, systemic patriarchy implies that our socio-­political order is ‘fixed’ and requires our ‘fatalistic submission’ (2016: 365). And while women – upon whose oppression the patriarchal system depends – are abundantly and often painfully aware of the inequalities, discriminations, and often fatal consequences of the system, men – who directly benefit from the system in any number of different ways – are often blind (sometimes wilfully blind) to the ways in which the system operates, or to how male privilege is predicated upon female disadvantage. Importantly, within this context of normalization, female disadvantage within the patriarchal system is explained away as women failing to achieve the same (male-­centred and male-­decided) ‘standards’ as men, while oppressive and misogynistic behaviour is dismissed simply as ‘boys being boys’. This was most recently, most visibly, and most troublingly seen during the 2016 American presidential campaign, in the debate surrounding the presidential candidate, and subsequently president, Donald Trump’s undeniably misogynistic comments about a range of women that were widely dismissed as acceptable, normal and natural ‘locker room talk’ (Mahdawi 2016). This naturalization of what we might otherwise identify as sexual assault or sexual abuse as harmless ‘talk’ amongst men is, as Arwa Mahdawi rightly argued, ‘what rape culture looks

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like’ (2016). What was especially disturbing was that the misogyny was expressed by someone aiming to be elected as the ‘leader of the free world’. Equally disturbing were the ways in which this behaviour was excused by a large number of patriarchal institutions and media outlets, which colluded to demonstrate the kinds of systemic patriarchal abuses we see in Silko’s text. Indeed, the fact that we have, in the early twenty-­first century, coined the term ‘rape culture’ to identify the misogyny of patriarchal systems points directly and troublingly back to exactly the kinds of dangerous gender imbalances we are shown in Almanac. It is, therefore, important to consider our current critical understanding of ‘rape culture’. According to Emily Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher and Martha Roth, ‘rape culture’ is ‘a complex set of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women’ where ‘physical and emotional terrorism against women’ is depicted ‘as the norm’ (2004: xi); it is, as Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry have argued, a culture where ‘victims are routinely disbelieved or blamed for their own victimization’ and where ‘perpetrators are rarely held accountable or their behaviours seen as excusable or understandable’ (2014: 2). It is notable that, within rape cultures, ‘manifestly sexist attitudes and beliefs . . . do not exist in isolation but rather are part of a broader manifestation of gender inequality, prevalent in the language, laws and institutions that are supposed to criminalize, challenge and prevent sexual violence but instead perpetrate, support, condone or reflect these values’ (Powell and Henry 2014: 2). And, most importantly, rape cultures – like vampire capitalism, like systemic patriarchy – actively naturalize themselves to ensure that, as Buchwald et al. argue, ‘both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable’ (2004: xi, emphasis added). This, as Powell and Henry asserted, not only means that the ‘erroneous . . . belief that rape is an inevitable and natural fact of life’ is ‘deeply embedded’ in rape cultures, but that this itself ensures powerful ‘[r]esistance to changing or challenging . . . rape culture’ (2014: 2). Significantly, much like the kind of homosocial–homosexual continuum identified by Sedgwick that we can see operating within the male patriarchal worlds of Silko’s text, the sexualized violences experienced by women within extra-­textual patriarchal rape cultures also form a ‘continuum of threatened violence’, one that ‘ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself ’ (Buchwald et al. 2004: xi). Rape culture is, at its core, ‘a society where violence [against women] is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent’ (Buchwald et al. 2004: xi), and where such gendered violence ‘is eroticised in literary, cinematic and media representations’ (Powell and Henry 2014: 2). Our twenty-­first-century understandings of rape culture are crucial to a retrospective reading of Almanac, which points repeatedly to a continuum of systemic, institutionalized and individual acts of sexualized violence shown to its female characters. And Almanac shows us that this kind of sexualized violence derives directly from the ways in which female bodies are commodified, bought and sold, transformed into property that is owned and exchanged by men: as Richard C. Trexler has argued, ‘the language of sexuality remain[s] in

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modern society a key way of talking about property and power’, especially male power (1995: 19). And so Almanac shows us how ‘private’ patriarchal violence is related to that which is ‘public’, how the domestic is linked to the systemic. As readers, we can see how the sexual abuse of both Lecha and Zeta as young girls by their ‘Uncle Frederico and his fat, dirty fingers’ (1991: 126) can be directly related to Zeta’s subsequent adult experiences, as she finds her only route to promotion and to ‘a considerable measure of new power’ is through a remarkably non-­erotic and de-­sexualized encounter with her boss Mr Coco’s ‘pale grub or caterpillar’ penis (1991: 127, 126). As Joanna Ziarkowska has argued, it is notable that Uncle Frederico deliberately exploits his elite position within the text’s social hierarchies as a means by which to abuse his nieces, using ‘his authority as a physician’ and ‘his medical position’ to ‘justify’ the ‘sexual abuse’ that he disguises through his use of ‘medical vocabulary’ (2014: 62). Almanac also shows us Tucson strip clubs such as the Stagecoach that depict the workings of rape culture through the experiences of ‘exotic dancers’ like Cherie, who is under constant threat of male violence, not only from ‘the right kind of man [who] would have enjoyed parading his wildly sexual woman in front of the needy and deprived’ who watch the strippers, and the wrong kind of man ‘who will eventually want to kill her’ for the very act of stripping (1991: 69), but also from the Stagecoach’s owner Tiny, who forces a ‘much younger’ Cherie and Seese to supply his drugs to customers simply because they are both ‘under Tiny’s thumb’, and subsequently beats Cherie with ‘murder in his eye’ for getting arrested in a drugs raid (1991: 69, 71). We can detect the workings of a textual rape culture when we realize that Trigg’s obsession with building a ‘Pleasure Mall’ in Tucson, ‘an entire shopping mall [devoted] only to sex’, emerges from the sexual excitement he derives from mistreating the women he dehumanizes as ‘sows’: ‘I already see tears in her eyes . . . [that] get my dick hard’ (1991: 664, 386, 385). And we see the systemic abuses of rape culture above all in the ways that gendered violence is eroticized via the visual and cinematic image in Almanac’s graphic and disturbing discussions of the video and photography ‘industry’ dominated by the operations of the Mexican police chief and also Beaufrey. The systemic nature of the violence is exposed by the fact that the Mexican police ‘interrogations’ are filmed by a director from the Argentine porn industry on video cameras that are ‘gifts of the United States government’ whose payment is simply ‘duplicate tapes’ of the abuse of young Mexican street girls, whose genitals are painted with ‘lipstick and makeup. . . . so that they might show up better on the video screen’ as the ‘laughing’ police ‘interrogators’ ‘thrust a cattle prod inside the vagina’ (1991: 341, 342, 344). Most tellingly, we are informed that there is a concrete connection between the misogynistic violence of the individual and the misogynistic violence of the patriarchal state: while these videos tap into the vast market of ‘hundreds of thousands hopelessly addicted to the films of torture and dismemberment’, they serve an important second purpose as ‘an official record’ of ‘the punishment that awaited all agitators and communists’ who offer any kind of protest against the patriarchal

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state (1991: 342, 344). While female bodies are punished for simply being female, and for selling female sexuality outside of the control of men, or ‘pimp[s]’, it is notable that transgressive male bodies are also punished sexually: the Argentine porn director is himself tortured and geld[ed]’ (i.e. feminized, or made female) for overstepping the bounds of the state-­organized ‘interrogations’ (1991: 341, 347). Almanac constantly emphasizes that this ‘industry’ exploits a market that already exists within the imbalanced patriarchal rape cultures of the text, to make and distribute pornography, and videos and still images of death, torture, sexual assault, ‘sex-­change’ or gender realignment surgery, female circumcisions, abortions, and foetal experiments and dissections (1991: 102). And, appropriately, we are given graphic descriptions of the most ‘popular’ videos of ‘late abortions’ where ‘the forceps’ are shown ‘finding the skull [of the foetus] and crushing it’, where ‘tiny babies’ are seen to ‘grimace and twist away from the long needle probes and the curette’s sharp spoon’ (1991: 102); we are told of the high ‘demand’ for videos of the ‘ritual circumcisions of six year old virgins’ and shown the abuse of the female body through its de-­sexualization, and the appeal of seeing female sexual organs ‘soaked with blood’ (1991: 103). Most importantly, we see the high demand for ‘sex-­change’ films that show ‘the penis . . . peeled like a banana’ to make ‘an artificial vagina’, and that thus enact the emasculation and punishment of men within the patriarchal system. Tellingly, we discover that the ‘companion piece’ showing a female body made male is a ‘distribution failure’: there is simply no market that wants to see females or female bodies ‘rewarded’ in this way (1991: 103). What we see in Silko’s text is, quite clearly, ‘what rape culture looks like’, and Almanac’s twenty-­first-century readers continue to see very similar extra-­ textual expressions of misogyny justified as harmless locker-­room talk in ways that deny and erase the extra-­textual experiences of women globally. The justification of presidential candidate Trump’s comments by many parts of the global media, and his subsequent successful election as president, show us the ways in which rape culture successfully operates through patriarchal systems. These ensure that successful opposition is very difficult to achieve, and that female voices remain not only hard to hear but all too easily dismissed. Although millions of women – and men – marched in protest at Trump’s election around the world, few world leaders had the courage to point directly to Trump’s misogyny and other prejudices. A clear exception was the female German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose response to Trump’s election pointedly stated that ‘Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views’, and offered ‘close cooperation on the basis of these values’.4 However, it should be noted that, in their first public meeting, Trump’s behaviour towards Merkel – he refused to shake her hand and would barely look at her – was widely identified as the kind of ‘implicit sexism’ that is ‘all too familiar to women’, with Jessica Valenti arguing that ‘[m]en constantly ignore women – but most of the time no

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one notices it’ and that Trump simply did ‘what men do to women all the time’ (2017). Indeed, we see just such an example of normalized misogyny in Almanac when we are told that Beaufrey ‘had gone for days and sometimes weeks, without . . . in any way acknowledging Seese’s existence’ (1991: 49, original emphasis). Yet the constant excusing of this kind of misogynistic behaviour, whether textual or extra-­textual, not only reinscribes it as natural and normal, but enables the dismissal of any criticism. And so, any criticism of misogynistic behaviour – especially from those who are female or, worse yet, feminist – is dismissed as women who are unable to take a ‘joke’; as women who are attempting to enforce the increasingly hated tenets of ‘political correctness’; as women who are ‘oversensitive’ to unintended slights (to use the popular contemporary term, ‘snowflakes’); or who are consumed by a hatred of men in general. Such popular responses – that come, it should be reiterated, from both men and women – are endemic of the conditioning that we all undergo within the patriarchal system to accept these worldviews as ‘natural’ and anything that opposes them as ‘unnatural’. And so in Silko’s text we see multiple examples of our extra-­textual world reflected in the misogynistic contempt shown to textual women such as Seese. In addition to ignoring Seese’s very existence whenever he can, Beaufrey also provides ‘a kilo of coke’ in the hope that Seese will ‘dispose of herself automatically’ and, importantly, at little expense; provides an abortion, with some ‘urgency’, when Seese first falls pregnant; and, when Seese falls pregnant a second time and refuses to abort, shows real pleasure and enjoyment in describing in graphic detail to the pregnant Seese scientific ‘experiments on fetuses alive in the womb’ (1991: 50, 52, 101). While Almanac was responding to the situation in the late 1980s in the USA, we can clearly see that, in the early twenty-­first century, the situation for women within patriarchal systems has not improved, demonstrated by the speed with which the term ‘rape culture’ has entered the global critical and popular vocabularies. The result is that Almanac’s warnings of the dangers of rampant and unchecked patriarchal systems not only remain relevant, but can offer us important ways to read our own extra-­textual private and public experiences. What we see in Almanac’s reflection of its extra-­textual context is how deep-­ rooted misogyny is predicated upon the kinds of disconnection, competition and control that drive patriarchal systems, and require subjugation and imbalance. If we continue to read Silko’s novel through Coulthard’s lens of grounded normativity, then we can see that it is this entrenched disconnection, competition and control that works to actively deny and eliminate the very possibility of the reciprocity and obligation that is required if we are to live in relation to one another and to the world in what, Coulthard argued, are ‘nondominating and nonexploitative terms’ (2014: 13, emphasis added). Thus the dominating and exploitative violences shown to women, both in the ‘real world’ and in Silko’s text, are equalled only by the dominating and exploitative violences shown to the natural world by patriarchal cultures. A reading of the operations of patriarchy and gender in Almanac is therefore not complete

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without a consideration of the complex relationships between the violences shown to women and those directed against the natural world.

Femicide and the ‘death of nature’ To understand Almanac’s comparison of the violences directed against women and the natural world by the rape cultures of systemic patriarchy requires a consideration of the nature and extent of that dominating and exploitative violence. Ecofeminism as a disciplinary field has emerged from just this critical drive to understand those connections. In her seminal analysis – dating, notably, from 1980 and the start of the Reagan era – Carolyn Merchant traced the ways in which, alongside the rise to power of the mutually supportive systems of patriarchy and capitalism and their drive to create and expand land empires, ‘science’ was developed and deployed to ‘explain’ the changes that had to be made to old cultural ideologies to ensure the success of these new systems. As Merchant argued, the ‘scientific revolution’ from the seventeenth century onwards replaced ‘an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center’ with ‘a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive’ (1983: xvi). This new ‘dead’ natural world was, importantly in the context of Almanac, still viewed as female, and so was constructed ‘to be dominated and controlled by humans’, specifically by men (Merchant 1983: xvi). As Plumwood subsequently asserted, building upon Merchant’s argument: [t]o be defined as ‘nature’ in this context is to be defined as passive, as non-­ agent and non-­subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture (provided typically by the white, Western, male expert or entrepreneur) take place. It is to be defined as a terra nullius, a resource empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these purposes. (1993: 4)

Crucially, the crux of Merchant’s powerful and persuasive argument was that this reconstruction of the natural world constituted the ‘death of nature’, and the direct result was the ideological development of the kind of absolute lack of human care for their natural environments that was required by systems – patriarchal, capitalist, colonial, scientific, technological – that were dependent upon exploitation and subjugation. This lack of human care equates, in Coulthard’s terms, to a lack of understanding of reciprocity and to a lack of any notion of obligation: it is, quite literally, care-­less. In the early twenty-­first century, we can clearly see the real-­world effects in the ongoing commitment of patriarchal cultures to unsustainable lifestyles, and the ongoing denial of the

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very real environmental damage that is evident in the fact and effects of climate change. What we see, then, is a direct correlation between the sexual violence directed at women and the violences directed at the natural world, which is itself repeatedly violated, assaulted, raped. Importantly, Almanac traces these correlations, and I will here focus on the figure of Serlo to consider the direct relationships between violence against women and violence against the natural world within patriarchal systems. As with all aspects of Silko’s text, a good understanding of the extra-­textual context is essential for any analysis, and I will begin with violence against women. In 2012, the United Nations reported that violence against women had become ‘pandemic’, with alarming international figures showing that between 35 and 70 per cent of women would suffer physical, psychological or sexual abuse during their lifetimes, and that 50 per cent of all female homicides were committed by partners or family members (compared to 6 per cent of male homicides). This pandemic violence against women could, the UN asserted, be directly traced to the kinds of systemic and daily violence and aggression that women were experiencing via practices such as child marriage and pregnancy (700 million women per year), female genital mutilation (200 million per year), and human trafficking (70 per cent of people trafficked are women and girls), and via ingrained misogynistic behaviours that could be detected in public sexual harassment such as lewd and offensive comments and sexually inappropriate contact (92 per cent of women in New Delhi stated this was a problem), cyber-­harassment such as the receipt of unsolicited sexually explicit material or unwanted sexual advances (10 per cent of women in the European Union reported this), with one in three girls in the UK reporting gender-­based violence and inappropriate and offensive sexual behaviour at school (2012). The online Everyday Sexism Project, which charts women’s daily experiences of oppressive sexist and misogynistic behaviour, has been inundated with examples from women globally. Established to allow women a space to ‘report the way you have been treated, even if it has not been taken seriously elsewhere. To stand up and say “this isn’t right”, even if it isn’t big or outrageous or shocking. Even if you’ve got used to thinking that it is “just the way things are” ’,5 the Everyday Sexism Project makes for depressing reading, as it exposes the extent to which women are belittled, abused, oppressed and shown violence – often for simply vocalizing their experiences – on a daily basis. It should be noted that, as Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, soon discovered, simply speaking publicly against a patriarchal system that refuses to recognize female oppression meant death and rape threats on social media that exposed both the ‘sheer force of hatred that greets women who speak out’ and the ways in which systemic patriarchal control asserts itself through individual threats and acts of male violence (2017). In the context of Silko as Indigenous writer and Almanac as an Indigenous text, it is significant that some of the most extreme forms of patriarchal violence are those that continue to be perpetrated against Indigenous women in the

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Americas. The ‘Futures without Violence’ organization has estimated that Native American and Alaskan Native women are more than two and a half times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than the national average (2012); and the widespread normalization of sexual violence against Indigenous women is evident in the titling of a recent online graphic novel aimed at young Indigenous women, ‘What to Do When You’re Raped: An ABC Handbook for Native Girls’ (2016, emphasis added).6 Even more terrifying are the sheer numbers of Indigenous women who are missing or have been murdered in twenty-­firstcentury Canada, with recent newspaper reports suggesting that police estimates (in 2016, standing at 1,200) of the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada alone over the last three decades are woefully low, with The Guardian arguing that accurate figures ‘could number 4,000’ (2016). Indeed, the sheer volume of fatal assaults upon women globally has meant the emergence of a new term – ‘femicide’ – to signify the ‘killing of a woman or a girl, in particular by a man, and on account of her gender’. Such killings, like those resulting from any other kind of prejudice, are rightly identified by the majority of global societies as ‘hate crimes’, but are in reality rarely prevented or effectively policed, with few perpetrators punished. According to a report from the Academic Council of the United Nations System (ACUNS), femicide is ‘a global issue that demands action’ as it is ‘the extreme manifestation of existing forms of violence against women’ (2013, original emphasis). Further, violence against women is itself ‘institutionalized through family structures, social and economic frameworks, and cultural and religious traditions’, and acts of femicide ‘are not isolated incidents arising suddenly and/or unexpectedly’ but rather ‘the ultimate act of violence, experienced as part of a broader continuum of violence and discrimination. In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the rates of killings of women’ (2014, original emphasis). The UN Vienna Declaration, included within this report, further defined the kinds of killing of women that constitute femicide: 1) the murder of women as a result of domestic violence/intimate partner violence; 2) the torture and misogynist slaying of women; 3) killing of women and girls in the name of ‘honour’; 4) targeted killing of women and girls in the context of armed conflict; 5) dowry-­ related killings of women and girls; 6) killing of women and girls because of their sexual orientation or gender identity; 7) the killing of Aboriginal and Indigenous women and girls because of their gender; 8) female infanticide and gender-­based sex selection foeticide; 9) genital mutilation-­related femicide; 10) accusations of witchcraft; and 11) other femicides connected with gangs, organized crime, drug dealers, human trafficking, and the proliferation of small arms (2013). While our horror here should in no uncertain terms be directed at the need for such a term, the very existence of such a term that paradoxically yet inevitably normalizes and naturalizes these kinds of patriarchal violence should also be a source of horror. In addition, the variety of the kinds of killing that the UN has defined as femicide is equally horrifying, in large part because it points to the creativity with which female lives and bodies are broken and destroyed.

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This creativity, this creative destruction, is powerfully evident in Almanac, where Serlo’s ‘investment’ in reproductive research is shown to be both monetary and ideological, born from his entrenched misogyny. Repulsed by the ‘stink’ of women, Serlo is nonetheless obsessed with the need to reproduce his own ‘seed of noble blood’ and so ‘upgrade’ the genetic pool of the ‘masses’ (1991: 547). Serlo thus invests in a genetic science project that aims to develop a ‘superior human being’ by developing ‘an artificial uterus’ to overcome the fact that women are ‘not reliable or responsible enough to give the “superfetuses” their best chance at developing into superbabies’ (1991: 547). While this project is, as FischerHornung notes, comparable to the ‘racist eugenics’ that informed ‘the Nazi’s “Lebensborn” project’ aimed at producing ‘racially pure children’ (2014: 84), it is also clear that this is a form of femicide. Serlo’s focus on the dangers of the vampiric mother, on the ways in which ‘even the most perfect genetic specimen could be ruined, absolutely destroyed, by the defects of the . . . mother’, are easily resolved if the ‘engulf[ing]’ mother is eliminated. Since Serlo is convinced that any social and developmental ‘problems’ would be solved ‘if a child’s “parents” were both male’, it becomes clear that the kinds of ‘contagion’ that a mother’s body holds are not simply biological but also ideological. The ‘contagion’ is, therefore, the existence of the feminine and the biological female within the patriarchal system: a biological, cultural and ideological ‘fact’ that must be subjugated and eliminated. Serlo’s choice of elimination – removing women from the reproductive process via the development of an artificial uterus – thus serves a dual purpose by rendering women both ideologically and literally irrelevant and unnecessary within systemic patriarchy. This is, quite simply, an act of femicide. Yet, for Almanac’s twenty-­first-century reader, there are disturbing extra-­textual echoes. First, it is clear that Silko is drawing upon the real-­world scientific theories of the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who not only coined the term ‘ectogenesis’ to describe the human scientific development of an artificial womb, but in 1924 was already anticipating that ‘by 2074’ the artificial womb would ‘become so popular’ that ‘less than 30% of children’ would ‘be born of woman’.7 More worrying still is the development of an actual ‘artificial womb’ by genetic researchers in the early twenty-­first century. While the development of artificial wombs for humans is not likely to occur until the 2020s (the experiments to date have been with sheep), the media reports of early 2017 have nonetheless focused on ‘the ethics’ of the artificial womb, and the ways in which such developments are likely to ‘change our ideas of gender, family, and equality’ (Yuko and Prasad 2017). In the context of the kinds of misogyny shown by Serlo, and of my own assertion that this is a form of femicide, it is notable that The New Statesman is already asking ‘how worried should women be?’ in relation to the intentions behind such projects because, like Serlo, some ‘men’s rights activists’ are already ‘hop[ing] that technology will make women obsolete’ (2017). In this particular comparison of Almanac with its extra-­textual worlds, the twenty-­first-century reader can be both impressed and dismayed at the accuracy with which Silko has constructed her fictional patriarchal system.

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In both textual and extra-­textual contexts, it is important to note that the acts of patriarchal violence against women are almost always linked to sexual violence, and this is especially evident in the extra-­textual crimes against Indigenous women. Since, statistically, the vast majority of sexual crimes – over 70 per cent – against Native women are committed by white men, it was perhaps no surprise that the ‘Violence against Women Reauthorization Act’ of 2013 in the US acted specifically to enable tribal groups to prosecute non-­tribal members, an area of legal jurisdiction formerly fraught with inconsistencies that more often than not resulted in no prosecution, suggesting to existing or potential sexual offenders that tribally owned lands were a safe place to commit rape because sexual crimes against Native women went unpunished (Deer 2005). Importantly, leading Indigenous legal experts such as the Mvskoke attorney and professor of law, Sarah Deer – who played a crucial role in the 2013 Reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act – argued that, for Indigenous women, the effects of patriarchy in this instance are inextricably tied to colonialism. Rather than using carefully ‘emptied’ terms such as ‘pandemic’ or ‘epidemic’, Deer argued that we need to address the fact that ‘rape is a fundamental result of colonialism, a history of violence reaching back centuries’ (2015: x). Here, Silko’s reader can begin to further untangle the multiple meanings of the five-­hundred-year map that begins Almanac’s story. As we link the extra-­textual contexts of the sexually violent colonization of the Americas with the sexual violence directed against Indigenous women in the early twenty-­first century, we can see direct evidence of Almanac’s assertion that ‘the Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas’ (map legend). Almanac thus connects and explores historical and contemporary forms of extra-­textual sexual violence, and engages with the histories of European male sexual violence as a central feature of the conquest of the Americas by profoundly patriarchal societies. These histories, Trexler argued in his study Sex and Conquest, show the ways that commonly enacted male same-­sex acts of sexual violence – such as the rape of defeated warriors – acted to reiterate the existing patriarchal order by ensuring that defeated men were feminized and ‘changed into dependants’ in order to demonstrate ‘the power of one group of men over another’ (1995: 19). In Almanac’s ‘Reign of the Death Eye Dog’, an era marked as ‘male’ and therefore ‘very cruel’, we see clearly that these forms of conquest in the pursuit of absolute power are enshrined in the actions of the text’s voracious patriarchs (1991: 251). Both textually and extra-­textually, sexual violence is, Andrea Smith persuasively argued, ‘a tool of patriarchy and colonialism’, and the violence directed against the land itself is a ‘form of sexual violence’ and an extension of the forms of violent ‘control’ that patriarchal systems exert over those they subordinate (2005: 2, 3, 57). And this, of course, includes the natural world. In the figure of Serlo, we can see the ways in which the drive to femicide is directly linked to the drive to reconstruct and reconfigure the natural world as ‘dead and passive’. In Serlo’s scientific projects, we are shown how science

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emerges as a powerfully complicit partner of systemic patriarchy, capitalist enterprise and imperial domination. If Almanac’s textual patriarchal world – and by extension, the extra-­textual patriarchal worlds we as readers inhabit – has simultaneously produced and become dependent upon a rape culture, then it is clear that the natural world itself is subject to similar forms of violation. The disconnection, competition and control demanded and enabled by patriarchal systems results in subjugation and imbalance, and this actively requires the elimination of any understanding of reciprocity and obligation, either to other humans or to the natural world. Within this ‘pragmatic’ worldview, the natural world is exploitable, and so it is exploited. What is particularly chilling about Almanac’s engagement with these topics are the ways in which this connection is so precisely depicted. Alongside Serlo’s investment in the development of an artificial womb, we therefore see his equal investment in the development of ‘Alternative Earth module[s]’ (1991: 542). Recognizing the scale of the environmental damage being done to the Earth, Serlo invests in a research project that attempts to find a ‘solution’. Yet, predictably, Serlo’s solution derives directly from the ideologies of patriarchal rape culture, from the notion that what is exploitable should be, indeed deserves to be, exploited. The established feminization of the natural world means that the Earth is of no interest to Serlo, and the contagion that he sees is therefore gendered rather than a deliberate man-­made pollution. Accordingly, Serlo’s ‘solution’ is that the Earth must be eradicated rather than preserved, saved or healed. The ‘companion’ project to the artificial wombs that are designed to eliminate women is thus the creation of an engineered and simulated ‘alternative earth’. Serlo is quite clear about his intentions: In the end, the earth would be uninhabitable. The Alternative Earth modules would be loaded with the last of the earth’s uncontaminated soil, water, and oxygen and would be launched by immense rockets into high orbits around the earth where sunlight would sustain plants to supply oxygen, as well as food. (1991: 542)

What is notable here is that, true both to his elite social standing and wealth as a vampire capitalist, and to his status as one of Almanac’s patriarchs, Serlo displays no sense of responsibility or obligation either to the Earth or to the surviving humans he plans to exclude from his ‘alternative’. Even more importantly, Serlo refuses to spend his vast wealth on ‘saving’ the real Earth: for Serlo, the Earth is inevitably doomed, and the money is better spent on creating a newer and more effective ‘model’. Here, it is significant that Silko again draws upon her extra-­textual 1980s context: as Joni Adamson commented in her influential early analysis of Almanac, ‘Silko clearly alludes to Biosphere 2, a glass-­and-steel enclosure built in 1987 in the Sonoran Desert just north of Tucson, Arizona, by Texas billionaire Ed Bass and cofounder John Allen’ (2001:

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169). For Adamson, however, what is telling are the ways that Serlo’s project in Almanac reflects and echoes the popular speculations about Bass and Allen, that they ‘were simply rich, white, authoritarian cult leaders who were looking for a way to survive the coming environmental holocaust with a few chosen followers’ (2001: 169). Serlo’s ‘brave new world’ is, therefore, appropriately exclusive, not only echoing the exclusivity of the patriarchal homosociality which permeates and saturates the text, but also pointing to the complex and violent histories of America as a colony. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Serlo’s alternative Earth modules would orbit together in colonies, and the select few would continue as they always had, gliding in luxury and ease across polished decks of steel and glass islands where they looked down on earth as they had once gazed down at Rome or Mexico City from luxury penthouses, still sipping cocktails. (1991: 542)

The hierarchical superiority depicted exposes the reliance of Almanac’s patriarchal systems – and indeed extra-­textual patriarchal systems more widely – on rigidly enforced gendered and sexualized hierarchies. And it is notable that the inhabitants of this new alternative Earth look down not only on their social, sexual and racial ‘inferiors’, but also on the Earth itself. Through this example of an alternative ‘Earth’ that is a ‘closed system’ by design, Silko’s readers are forced to consider the ways in which our own extra-­textual systems are equally closed, and how they constructed this way by explicit patriarchal design. Serlo’s two ideologically intertwined patriarchal projects are remarkable for the ways in which they expose the interconnections between seemingly unrelated forms of dominating and exploitative violences. Silko’s reader is shown how the fundamental balance – the grounded normativity – required for living in ways that will not only provide sustainable human relations, but also sustainable relations between humans and their environments, is simply not achievable within Almanac’s profoundly imbalanced world of vampire capitalism and exclusive patriarchal homosociality. Moreover, we are shown the ways in which a further range of systems and institutions – science, medicine and academia – collude with and are implicated in the ideologies and discriminative policies of capitalist patriarchal societies and legal systems. The next chapter will, accordingly, develop these ideas further to consider how the discourses of science, medicine and academia are constructed to create and preserve profoundly hierarchical ‘discourses of difference’.

Notes 1 Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy (2nd edn, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 71.

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2 See, for instance, the discussion of ‘permissible homophobia’ in the text at The Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/09/1081690/-The-Free-PassPermissible-Homophobia. 3 The Daily Kos blog also points to an unusual critical avoidance of the topic (ibid.). 4 See ‘Angela Merkel’s Message to Trump’, New York Times (9 November 2016). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-­night-2016, emphasis added. In a world in which there are still very few female political leaders, it should be noted that the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, refused to condemn President Trump’s comments and was widely criticized as a result. See Rowena Mason, ‘Theresa May Reluctant to Challenge Trump’s “Unacceptable” Sexism’, The Guardian (22 January 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2017/jan/22/theresa-­may-donald-­trump-sexism-­us-trade-­talks-women. 5 See the Everyday Sexism Project, ‘About’, https://everydaysexism.com/about 6 See Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, ‘What To Do When You’re Raped: An ABC Handbook for Native Girls’ (2016). https://learn.uea. ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-1733205-dt-­content-rid-2547908_1/courses/AMAS7013A16-SEM1-A/abc_handbook_for_native_girls.pdf 7 See Glosswitch, ‘Artificial Wombs Are Only Three Years Away – How Scared Should Women Be? The New Statesman (5 May 2017). http://www.newstatesman.com/ politics/feminism/2017/05/artificial-­wombs-are-­only-three-­years-away-­howscared-­should-women-­be

Chapter 4 D iscourses o f di f f erence : S cience , M edicine and Academia

it is widely assumed by the scientific community, that modern science is objective, value-­free, and context-­free knowledge of the external world. To the extent to which the sciences can be reduced to this mechanistic mathematic model, the more legitimate they become as sciences.1 In her formative study The Death of Nature (1980), cited above, Carolyn Merchant noted that science in the late twentieth century has developed a series of ingrained internal assumptions that, much like those of capitalism and patriarchy, have been so naturalized and normalized that they remain very difficult to refute or to challenge. The notion that science is somehow ‘objective’ and free from any ‘values’ or ‘contexts’ is, if we consider it rationally, simply nonsensical: how can anything be without context? Indeed, the very notion of the context-less seems to embody the deliberate and often violent separation of humans from their contexts – other humans, the natural world – already under discussion in this study: to assert an absence of context is to reject any notion of relatedness. Yet as Merchant comments, these assumptions of a scientific objectivity that is value- and context-­free are widely held by the scientific community itself, and – by extension – by society more generally. Unsurprisingly, Almanac presents just such a challenge to these established scientific discourses, demonstrating their fabricated and constructed natures in order to expose their obscured yet fundamental ideological values and contexts. Almanac therefore traces the complex relationships between the discourses of science, medicine and academia and the interests and agendas of homosocial patriarchy and vampire capitalism. An awareness and understanding of these extra-­textual histories and contexts are essential to a detailed reading of Silko’s novel. The development of European capitalist and patriarchal systems as new foundational socio-­political and cultural ‘truths’ coincided with the emergence of powerful ideological scientific and academic discourses to conceptualize, to rationalize and – most importantly – to naturalize these new ‘truth’ systems. This chapter will therefore explore how the powerful ideological discourses of science,

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medicine and academia emerged and developed in concert with the power systems within which they operate and with which they cooperate. In order to read Almanac’s exploration and deployment of hierarchical ‘discourses of difference’, this chapter will focus on the ways in which scientific and academic discourses maintain and support existing power structures through their authority to create hierarchies, to define ‘difference’, to construct ‘otherness’. This authority, as Silko’s readers are consistently made aware, has explicit historical roots in the development of European patriarchal and capitalist systems, and in the role played by those systems in the European drive for empire and desire for the imperial ‘bodies’ represented by colonized lands and subjects. To fully understand Almanac’s deployment of scientific, medical and academic discourse, it is therefore vital to consider the ways in which what we identify as ‘science’ was subject to its own violent ‘revolution’ that had profound and long-­lasting effects upon human minds and bodies, and upon the natural world. It is in this historical development of science that we can clearly see the roots of our own contemporary ideological and political struggles over the processes of othering and the creation of difference, and also over the realities of climate change and the possibilities, and/or impossibilities, of sustainable living. Othering, difference, and the rejection of relatedness, whether between humans or with the natural world, are therefore all interconnected – both in Silko’s novel and in our extra-­textual worlds. So, if we are to read Almanac successfully within Coulthard’s concept of grounded normativity, if we are to fully understand why sustainable living is potentially unachievable within Almanac’s profoundly imbalanced world of vampire capitalism and exclusive patriarchal homosociality, then it is essential that we explore the ways in which scientific and academic discourses have historically facilitated, supported, even actively encouraged, the damage humans inflict upon other humans and upon the natural world. It is with the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century that we can begin to see the rise of powerful new ideological discourses. As Merchant has argued, these discourses saw the blunt rejection of established and recognized Renaissance ‘idea[s] of nature as a living organism’ based upon an ‘immensely flexible’ notion of the ‘organic’ (1985: 2, original emphasis). Instead, the new discourses defined nature ‘as disorder’ and, accordingly, introduced two new ‘core concepts’ – ‘mechanism’ and ‘the domination and mastery of nature’ – as the means by which to enforce a profoundly human order (Merchant 1985: 1, 2). In 1637, the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes’ seminal thesis Discourse on Method laid out the ‘principles’ for this new understanding of the human place in the natural world. Descartes’ most (in)famous assertion, ‘cogito ergo sum’, or ‘I think, therefore I am’, emphasized the negation of established popular understandings of organic human–nature interdependence (1968: 53). The cogito proclaimed instead that human is distinct from nature and specifically denied relatedness; moreover, it proclaimed that the human mind was to be venerated over and above the human body: ‘the mind, by which I am what I am,

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is entirely distinct from the body’ (1968: 54, emphasis added). The profoundly influential outcome of Descartes’ assertion was the explanatory potential it held for the enactment of a wide range of individual, collective and systemic violences. Via an application of Cartesian principles, these individual, collective and systemic violences could be supported, enabled and facilitated. Additionally, these violences could be directed against human bodies because these could now be identified and described via the cogito as ‘entirely and truly distinct’ from the mind. In the Cartesian argument, the mind ‘may exist without’ the body because ‘even if the body were not’ the mind ‘would not cease to be all that it is’ (Descartes 1968: 156, 54, emphasis added). The body thus becomes surplus to requirements, and available for violent control. The new Cartesian method was intrinsically and often explicitly violent, advocating a breaking down and a controlling of human bodies that demonstrated the Cartesian belief in the supremacy of the mind. As Susan Griffin noted, according to Cartesian logic, ‘proper control [of] the body’ means that it ‘becomes obedient to the . . . mind’ (1984: 34). To reflect again briefly on the concerns of the last chapter, this process of cerebral supremacy can be seen to be both endangered and threatened by physical and sexualized bodies, and by uncontrolled female sexuality; the result is not only a policing of those bodies and sexualities but also their violent control. Much like the ‘love of death’ that can be detected within the violent acts of Silko’s novel, this desire to control, explore and exploit human bodies can be traced even earlier than the moment of Descartes’ cogito. From the late fifteenth century, there had been a new focus on the human body in Europe that created what Jonathan Sawday has termed a ‘culture of dissection’, where the emphasis on ‘dissection’ also connoted a ‘ “reduction” into parts’, ‘a violent act of partition’, and ‘a brutal dismemberment of people, things or ideas’ (1995: viii, 1, emphasis added). In the mid-­sixteenth century, these notions of violent separation coalesced in the new Cartesian method. While advocating a breaking down and a controlling of human bodies, the new Cartesian method simultaneously advocated that related forms and processes of violence should be directed against things and ideas, in particular against the natural world that had been newly redefined as static and passive. The natural world was, therefore, to be subject to identical forms of dissection and categorization so that humans could ‘kno[w] the power and the effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies which surround us’ for the specific purpose of furthering human knowledge and comfort (1968: 78). Perhaps most significantly, Descartes’ primary aim was an extension of the dominion evident in Genesis: the natural world was to be exploited so that humans could ‘enjoy . . . the fruits of the earth and all its commodities’; and Descartes’ phrasing here has telling and tantalizing echoes of capitalist terminology and values (1968: 78, emphasis added). Specifically, this exploitation would derive from ‘the invention of an infinity of [technological] devices’ so that this enjoyment would be ‘without any effort’ on the part of humans (1968: 79). The culmination of Descartes’ argument quite clearly shows

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the negation of any notion of human–nature inter-­relatedness or reciprocity: it is via Cartesian principles that humans will become ‘masters and possessors of nature’ (1968: 78, emphasis added). Central to this new science that informed and enabled the ‘violence of dissective culture’ was a rejection of any suggestion of the obligation required for sustainable human relations, or for sustainable relations between humans and their environments (Sawday 1995: 2). The violence of this new drive towards a scientific ‘dissection’ of the world is equally evident in the shift from an understanding of the organic nature of all human and non-­human life to a reformulation of human and non-­human bodies as ‘machines’, as essentially and fundamentally un-natural. Building upon extant yet innovative scientific theories, Descartes argued in his Treatise on Man that ‘the body is nothing else but a statue or earthen machine’ whose ‘functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-­weights and wheels’ (1985: 99, 108, emphasis added). This fascination for the machine, for technological innovation, is intrinsic to Cartesian thought, where ‘the invention of an infinity of [technological] devices’ is determined to be essential to future human comfort (1968: 79). As a result, the Cartesian worldview was profoundly mechanistic and, as Merchant has succinctly argued, this mechanistic way of observing the world was deployed to explain and naturalize ‘new forms of order and power’ designed to ‘remedy . . . the disorder’ detected in ‘the organic world’ (1985: 192). Indeed, Merchant continued, the ‘new mechanical philosophy’ not only became a ‘unifying model for science and society’ but the notion of the machine has subsequently ‘permeated and reconstructed human consciousness so totally that we scarcely question its validity’ (1985: 192, 193). Significantly, this new ‘mechanical order’ also supported, colluded with, and enabled other emerging or developing forms of power and control. As Merchant noted, the ‘conceptual framework . . . [of] the mechanical order had associated with it a framework of values based on power, fully compatible with the directions taken by commercial capitalism’; and, we might add, with the complex forms of complicity between capitalist and patriarchal systems and structures (1985: 193). Above all, Cartesian thinking equated knowledge with both power and control. Thus, one of the most attractive and seductive ideological strands of Cartesian thought can be detected in Descartes’s contention that ‘I observed nothing [in the natural world] that I could not easily enough explain by means of the principles I had found’ (1968: 80). Here, the very wording of this contention, the suggestion that these principles that Descartes has invented have been somehow ‘found’, discovered – perhaps, to address its intrinsic destruction of human–nature relatedness, even un-­earthed – demonstrates the ways in which the new scientific discourse from its earliest examples consciously and deliberately enacted its own naturalization and normalization. As Griffin has argued, this new human relationship to the natural world was one of profound rationality,

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where ‘nature shall only be approached through [human] reason’, through the separate and separated mind, since the natural world had been redefined as ‘matter’ with ‘no intellect and no perception’ (1984: 14). This naturalization of a manufactured and created scientific process was subsequently replicated in and deployed through the discourses of medicine and academia; and it reflected, and was reflected by, simultaneous developments in patriarchal and capitalist systems and imperial ideologies. As Sawday has stated, the process by which human bodies were laid out for consumption – both scientific and popular2 – ‘was truly colonial, in that it appeared to reproduce the stages of discovery and exploitation which were, at that moment, taking place within the context or the European encounter with the New World’ (1995: 25, emphasis added). In this context, Sawday argued that ‘[t]he body was a territory, an (as yet) undiscovered country, a location which demanded from its explorers skills which seemed analogous to those displayed by the heroic voyagers across the terrestrial globe’ (1995: 23). If we accept Sawday’s assertion that these new scientists should be interpreted as ‘heroic voyager[s] and intrepid discoverer[s]’, then we must also consider how this new scientific process was inextricably linked to, complicit with, and supportive of the violent imperial forms of control and subjugation directed at newly colonized human bodies and lands (1995: 24). The scientific revolution, and the new scientific method it advocated, acted directly to sanction the exploitation of the natural world, the expansion of national lands and capitalist projects and markets, and the subjugation of women and other social groups who had been identified – and so explicitly marked – by their ‘difference’. It acted, therefore, to facilitate the power structures and the violent controls of systemic capitalism and patriarchy. In order to fully engage with Almanac’s explorations of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy, we must consider the ways in which, as Christine Cuomo contended, ‘values, notions of reality, and social practices are related’ and how ‘forms of oppression and domination, however historically and culturally distinct, are interlocked and enmeshed’ (1998: 1). Accordingly, this chapter will trace the ways in which Almanac shows how scientific and academic discourses are put to use as tools for oppression, acting – both consciously and unconsciously – to support and facilitate misogyny and racial and social discrimination in the wider societies governed by vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy. Beginning with a consideration of the ways in which the new scientific method laid the foundations for the development of eugenics, the next section will explore the complicity of science in the kinds of violent control of human bodies that are evident in communal or national acts of misogyny or racism. These acts, by their very definition, demonstrate the ‘marking of difference’ via a systemic targeting of specific sections of the human communities or populations. The subsequent section will develop this argument further to consider how bodies of all kinds – human and non-­human – are ‘broken’ by the complex interactions of a ‘dissective’ scientific and medical discourse with the

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slow violences of systemic patriarchal capitalism. And this chapter will conclude with an examination of the ways in which academic discourses enforce and reinforce these established power relations and violent forms of control through their authority to create hierarchies, define ‘difference’ and construct ‘otherness’.

Eugenics and the ‘naturalized logic of inequality’ Almanac makes a clear connection between the abuses of scientific knowledge and the abuses of systemic power through its exploration of violent forms of institutional and institutionalized control. As the last chapter noted, Serlo’s ‘twin’ scientific research projects to create ‘artificial wombs’ and ‘alternate earth units’ are explicitly and essentially violent in their control of female bodies, of human reproduction, and of the ecological biosphere. This violence emerges first and foremost from the ideological and political aims of these two textual scientific projects: the desire to make irrelevant and unnecessary both women and the natural world. Importantly, these ideological and political aims expose the fabricated nature of extra-­textual claims that science is objective, value-­free and context-­free. What Silko takes great care to show us in Almanac are the ways in which scientific discourse often has clear and sometimes highly problematic ideological aims, and how – even when scientific research does manage to be relatively value-­free and pursued for the sake of knowledge alone – those aims can be hijacked by the varied and various interests of systemic patriarchal capitalism. In a textual world in which anything and everything can be bought for the right price, Almanac shows us that science cannot escape the ‘market’. Instead, power is maintained by the elite vampire capitalists and homosocial patriarchs of the text, via a violent control of scientific knowledge and discourse. A consideration of Almanac’s extra-­textual context is crucial here, and we can begin to trace the extra-­textual histories and legacies upon which Silko draws through a consideration of ground-­breaking historical scientific moments that remain influential in the early twenty-­first century. As Patricia Fara observed in her study of the founding father of botany Carl Linnaeus, ‘[s]cientific investigators are driven not only by their genuine fascination with nature, but also by other motives – power, money, fame’, and so the story of Linnaeus’s development of the most widely used taxonomic classification system in our contemporary world is also the story of ‘how scientific research is intertwined with commercial development and imperial exploitation’ (2004: 17). The very nature of the Cartesian method, the reduction of everything into its constituent parts, the requisite repression and fracturing of human relationships with their environments, acted to facilitate the development of complex and influential scientific systems of classification. The possibilities that the Cartesian method created were almost immeasurable: the entire natural and human world was made ‘available’ for human indexing, classification and ordering. It is

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no coincidence that the very terminology of Linnaeus’s influential 1735 treatise Systema Naturae replicated the Cartesian desire to create human order out of natural disorder. And yet the hierarchical nature of Linnaeus’s classification system is clearly problematic: while science resolutely and stubbornly claimed its objectivity, it nonetheless demonstrably reproduced the values, politics and prejudices of its own socio-­cultural world. The links between the domestic and the public, the individual and the systemic, are evident in the terminology that Linnaeus deployed: his animal and plant species are organized hierarchically into ‘families’ and ‘species’. A clear problem that can be immediately identified with Linnaeus’s system is its inbuilt misogyny: his plants are classified ‘according to their sexual organs’ even though it was already widely accepted that ‘many plants are hermaphrodites’ (Fara 2004: 21). Replicating the misogyny of his own patriarchal world, Linnaeus thus ordered his plant hierarchies on the basis of the primacy of male reproductive organs, creating a system that Fara identified as ‘sexual discrimination’, where plants identified as ‘female’ were automatically ranked lower (2004: 21). Importantly, as Fara commented, this sleight of hand ensured that a patriarchal ordering of the natural world represented itself as natural, and so Linnaeus’s classification system ‘not only mirrored social prejudice, but also reinforced it’ (2004: 22). Equally problematic were the ways in which Linnaeus’s organization of animals and plants into anthropomorphic hierarchies allowed for the social and racial ‘classification’ of human beings. As Neil Macmaster has noted in his discussion of ‘the roots of modern racism’, in the 1740 second edition of his Systema Naturae Linnaeus ‘went on to subdivide man into four races, according to skin colour: the white European, the dark Asian, the black African and the red American’ (2001: 12). This ordering of a supposedly ‘value-­free’ classification system via a series of discernibly discriminatory hierarchies ensured that Linnaeus’s system was deployed during the course of the nineteenth century to explain and justify constructed and imposed human social, racial and gender hierarchies. If science replicated external sexual prejudices, then it certainly replicated external racial prejudices, both in the identification of different human ‘species’ or ‘races’ and in their ‘ordering’ on a continuum from ‘civilized’ (identified as European) to ‘savage’ (identified as African). But it is important to remember that what we now term ‘scientific racism’ was, at the time, simply accepted as scientific evidence and ‘fact’: as Louis Menand has commented, the most eminent scholars and proponents of scientific racism in the US had established a ‘racist academic consensus’ at the very epicentre of American academia, Harvard University (1995: 110). Here, Samuel Morton (identified still as the ‘founding father’ of American anthropology) and Louis Agassiz (a Swiss-­born biologist and geologist) created a scientific consensus that drew upon Social Darwinism to argue in favour of a hierarchy of different human ‘races’ based on scientific ‘experiments’ that measured, among other things, cranial capacity as a marker of an ‘intelligence’ that was directly linked to ‘development’ and ‘civilization’. Morton’s and Menand’s theories were enormously influential, and were in

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America very effectively co-­opted and deployed – both popularly and by institutions of all kinds – as a way of ranking racial groups, of ensuring and maintaining white privilege, and of subjugating Native Americans and African Americans during the nineteenth century and beyond. While the experiments of scientists such as Morton have long been disputed and disproved,3 it nonetheless remains clear that scientific arguments were enormously influential in terms of popular understandings of ‘race’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as a means by which to rationalize and justify the enactment of violent forms of control such as colonization, slavery and genocide. Perhaps the most internationally impactful arguments of scientific racism were those advanced by Charles Darwin’s own first cousin, Francis Galton, the creator of ‘eugenics’. Galton’s work aimed, as Nicholas Gillham argues, to ‘improve[e] humanity through selective breeding’; and to achieve what Daniel Kevles identifies as ‘the dream . . . that human beings might take charge of their own evolution’ (2001: 86; 2016: 45). But Galton’s work has since become deeply controversial, in part because it was subsequently deployed – it should be noted, as Galton hoped it would be – as state policy in the 1930s by the German Nazi party as part of the ‘Lebensborn’ project to promote and ensure ‘racial purity’ (Gillham 2001: 86). While the Nazi project is, rightly, pointed to as the epitome of social and racial genetic engineering, it is significant to my consideration here of Almanac that this idea of ‘human improve[ment]’ was equally popular in the United States. Here, Kevles has commented, a range of ‘Fitter Family competitions’ were introduced in the early twentieth century whose ideological prejudices were evident in the ways in which ‘fitness’ was measured: via ‘an IQ test – and the Wasserman test for syphilis’ (2016: 46). Moreover, Kevles pointed to a series of related and overtly discriminatory and violent controls that, during this same period, were directed against those identified as ‘undesirabl[e]’ as ‘many US states enacted laws authorizing compulsory sterilization of people considered unworthy and sterilized some 36,000 hapless victims by 1941’ (2006: 45, 46). These figures, of course, pale into insignificance beside the numbers of Indigenous women sterilized by the Indian Health Service in the United States, usually without patient knowledge or consent. As Jane Lawrence has argued, ‘the Indian Health Service sterilized between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women between 1970 and 1976’, alongside large numbers of women from ‘African American and Hispanic’ backgrounds (2000: 410, 409). Significantly, Lawrence noted, ‘[t]he main reasons [that] doctors gave for performing these procedures’, contrary to scientific claims to be value- and context-­free, ‘were economic and social in nature’ (2000: 410). As a result, ‘the majority of physicians were white, Euro-American males who believed that they were helping society by limiting the number of births in low-­income, minority families’ and by ‘enabling the government to cut funding for Medicaid and welfare programs while lessening their own personal tax burden to support the programs’ (2000: 410). It can be argued that these ‘health policies’ represent a form of genocide in that they actively prevent entire groups from biologically

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reproducing, and it is clear that these controversial legacies of Galton’s eugenics project derive, much like Linnaeus’s classification system, from the inbuilt ideologies – the values and contexts – of Galton’s own theories. Consequently, these foundational values and contexts replicate and are thus inseparable from Galton’s own inherently racist beliefs in white progress and non-­white racial degeneration. It is therefore disturbing that Paul Gray’s 1999 re-­examination of eugenics continued to affirm that eugenicists such as Galton were ‘usually well-­ meaning progressive types’ who ‘did not know they were shaping a rationale for atrocities’, an argument which not only continues to refute any responsibility on the part of the scientist for the outcomes and uses of his/her research, but also worryingly replicates the idea of science as value-­less and context-­less, and the scientist him/herself as solely objective and even altruistic (Gillham 2001: 84). Yet Galton’s project is also problematic for its emphasis upon ‘hereditary ability’, and so upon the value of ‘nature’ over ‘nurture’ (Gillham 2001: 87). While Galton’s obsession was, as Gillham has commented, with human ‘pedigree’ and so with the concept of ‘breeding’, Kevles has argued that it is this very focus that produces ‘a strategy fraught with epistemological and prejudicial pitfalls’ (2001: 87; 2016: 48). Not only did this focus replicate Galton’s own social world, but it had a two-­fold ideological and political outcome. On the one hand, it ensured that the hierarchies of Galton’s social world were maintained, with the social elites kept firmly in place at the top. On the other hand, it ensured that the social status of the majority at the bottom of that hierarchy – the oppressed, the disadvantaged, the othered, the ‘different’ – was identified as their own fault (nature) and not as the result of their environment or life experiences (nurture). With one very neat ideological move, Galton’s theory of eugenics conveniently explained and maintained the existing social order. Moreover, since the lower social ‘classes’ or groups were now identified as responsible for their own lowly position in the hierarchy, tricky issues such as poverty, discrimination, prejudice and disadvantage could be redefined as problems that were ‘individual’ rather than systemic, with the result that inequality did not need to be addressed by the hierarchical elites. In this conception, therefore, Almanac’s vampire capitalists and homosocial patriarchs can remain divorced from, and feel no empathy, responsibility or obligation for, other human beings or the natural world. And, while this concept clearly has links to the arguments I made in Chapter 2 regarding the naturalization of poverty in the late twentieth century, Galton’s theory of eugenics also emerges directly from ‘his view that society must dispense with the erroneous idea of natural equality among humans’ (Dennis 1995: 246). And so Galton’s theory of eugenics works to naturalize a logic of inequality that replicates and strengthens the unequal hierarchies already imposed – by Genesis, by the Cartesian method, by Linnaeus’s taxonomies – between humans, and between humans and the natural world. This naturalized logic of inequality is painfully evident within Almanac, which engages directly with the multiple and troubling legacies of Galton’s desire ‘to multiply society’s “desirables” and get rid of its “undesirables” ’ (Kevles

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2016: 45). Everywhere, Almanac shows us who its vampire capitalist and homosocial patriarch elites define as ‘undesirable’: the homeless, the poor, those addicted to drugs and alcohol, ex-­military veterans with PTSD, the mentally ill, those ‘marked’ by female biology, the disabled, those with alternative or ‘challenging’ political or environmental views, and – most significantly for Almanac’s discussions of historical legacies – the descendants of African slaves and Indigenous peoples. And so we can begin to more fully situate Serlo’s obsession with the artificial womb, which does not derive solely from his hatred of women but also from his Galtonian understanding of ‘pedigree’ that his ‘science enthusiast’ grandfather has encouraged (1991: 547). Serlo’s grandfather ‘had practiced only masturbation into steel cylinders where his semen was frozen for future use’ with the aim that ‘his seed of noble blood’ might be used to ‘upgrad[e]’ the ‘masses of Europe’ (1991: 547). And while Serlo continues this practice of masturbation into ‘sterile, prewarmed stainless steel cylinders used for the artificial insemination of cattle’, his wider plans are the collection of ‘sperm contributions from European males of noble birth lest rare and distinguished lineages disappear without issue’ (1991: 547). This desire for elite social engineering feeds directly into Serlo’s obsession with the artificial womb, since there was ‘little use in bringing a genetically superior man into a world crowded and polluted by the degenerate masses’ (1991: 546, emphasis added). In Serlo’s words, moreover, we can detect how the equation of elite with ‘genetically superior’ depends directly upon the suppression and oppression of the ‘masses’ via the imposed hierarchies of class, wealth and race, as Serlo comments on the volume of ‘yellows, browns and blacks’ who are, through the brutal nature of the hierarchies imposed upon them, encouraged to ‘slaughter one another’ (1991: 546). Yet, Serlo is not content to wait for this ‘natural’, if somewhat lengthy, solution, and we subsequently see the deadly and fatal scientific solutions provided by ‘biological and chemical agents [that] were far superior to bullets and bombs because they worked silently and anonymously’ (1991: 547). Reflecting the increasingly hysterical extra-­textual debates surrounding the ‘A IDS crisis’ in the 1980s, the third project that Serlo is deeply involved in is the development and deployment of the HIV virus as a biological weapon. Silko quite obviously taps into the controversies of the extra-­textual debate around HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, including the increasingly violent state and institutional discourses that, because of the growing numbers of gay men infected with the virus, reaped political capital from its erroneous labelling as a ‘gay plague’ that was, according to Christian conservatives, providing some kind of ‘divine punishment’ for ‘sexual transgression’. While this ‘naturalized’ definition enabled the further demonization of gay men, it equally ensured the elimination of any kind of classed, gendered or racialized debate. As Jennifer Briers has argued, the construction of the AIDS discourse in the 1980s demonstrated a failure to ‘acknowledge[e] the racial [or gender] implications of the AIDS epidemic’ and the ‘larger discussion of economic inequality and the role it played in the local and global spread of AIDS’ (2009: 3). For Briers, the

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power of this violent extra-­textual discourse on AIDS itself equated to a range of ‘infectious ideas’ that were very difficult to combat due to their replication of a series of pre-­existing, and so already naturalized, social prejudices (2009). And we see this replicated in the scientific discourses in Silko’s novel where – like the textual violences of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy, and the extra-­textual slow violence of environmental damage – the scientific violences directed against the ‘masses’ of Almanac’s pages are not only attritional and impossible to combat, but appear to be both ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. It is no coincidence that Silko’s examination of AIDS discourse in Almanac engages directly with the extra-­textual Reagan administration’s failure to acknowledge the existence of AIDS: although the virus was first detected and diagnosed in the USA in 1981, and killed more than five thousand American citizens in the early 1980s, Reagan infamously remained silent on the topic until 1985 (Lawson 2015). Alongside silence was invisibility: as Gena Corea has argued, AIDS was itself an ‘invisible epidemic’ (1993). Indeed, a 2015 documentary, When AIDS Was Funny, aired ‘never-­before-heard audio reaction to the escalating AIDS crisis’ from the Reagan administration, which demonstrated that ‘urgent questions’ from the media were met with ‘derisive laughter’ and ‘[w]ith snickering, homophobic jokes and a disturbing air of uninterest’ (Lawson 2015). In its representation of AIDS, Almanac develops the notions of silence and invisibility even further to suggest a textual collusion between government and elite groups. Here, the textual scientific violences of state- and elite-­sponsored biological warfare are also impossible to see and have the added bonus that ‘[n]o one could prove a thing’ (1991: 547). Silko’s exploration of the AIDS debate develops Galton’s naturalized logic of inequality to its rational conclusion, suggesting that AIDS is a virus that has been deliberately developed by Serlo’s research project as a form of ‘biological warfare’ that will rid the human population of its ‘undesirables’ (1991: 546). Moving beyond the artificial semination project to ‘upgrade’ the masses, Serlo anticipates that ‘the day would come when the world was overrun with swarms of brown and yellow human larvae called natives’ who could offer a formidable challenge to the elite power bases of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy (1991: 545). The direct result is Serlo’s involvement in a research project to develop a ‘great biological bomb’: resulting from ‘international collaboration’, the project depends upon existing human inequalities for its successful creation of ‘the first “designer virus” specifically for targeted groups’ (1991: 548). Accordingly, the HIV ‘bomb’ is first ‘detonated in Africa where researchers hoped malnutrition would enhance the virus’s power’ and where the ‘billions and billions of troops’ represented by the ‘virus army’ would ensure the logical outcome of many generations of human ideological prejudice: ‘[t]he filthy would die. The clean would live’ (1991: 548). At the heart of Serlo’s international scientific project of biological warfare is the concept that ‘[t]here was a strict biological order to the natural world: in this natural order, only sangre pura sufficed to command instinctive obedience

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from the masses’ (1991: 549). Here, text collides with and exposes its extra-­ textual context, as it becomes abundantly and often painfully clear to Silko’s reader that this concept is equally at the heart of the majority of our own extra-­ textual international social orders in the early twenty-­first century. However, Almanac also persistently deconstructs any notion of ‘natural’ social hierarchies through its exposure of the ways in which those hierarchies are engineered and imposed by human elite groups for their own benefit and to further their own socio-­political aims. And so we see the extreme example of Serlo’s international scientific project accompanied, and notably aided and abetted, by other more ‘ordinary’ and so more pervasive forms of ideological prejudice and violent control that also embody and practise the naturalized logic of inequality. Directly alongside Serlo’s international scientific project, there is a discussion of Beaufrey’s role as a ‘private [drugs] contractor’ employed by the US government (1991: 549). In a direct reference back to the ‘targeted groups’ for Serlo’s virus, Beaufrey argues that illegal drugs also have a very carefully chosen market (1991: 549). Moreover, Beaufrey’s claim, that ‘the abundance of cocaine in the United States had been planned by US strategists who were concerned that heroin users in ghettos would not spread the HIV infection fast enough’, also demonstrates the knowledge and direct involvement of a range of elected textual governments with scientific research projects that promote established ideological human hierarchies (1991: 548). Almanac’s readers are here shown the collusion of system and the elite individual, as governments and institutions act to protect the white privilege of the text’s individual vampire capitalists and homosocial patriarchs through the violent control of those lower at the bottom of the social order: ‘[w]ithout cocaine, the millions of young black and Hispanic men and women confined to ghettos in U.S. cities would riot’ (1991: 549). Almanac’s exposure of the ways in which systemic prejudicial and racialized agendas operate via the naturalized logic of inequality also demonstrates the ways in which those agendas rely upon and make use of the founding scientific concepts of a ‘culture of dissection’ (Sawday 1991: viii). The dependence of this culture of dissection on, as Sawday argues, ‘a brutal dismemberment of people, things or ideas’ is the subject of the next section, which will discuss how Almanac’s love of death directly links what we might otherwise dismiss as the predilections of individual characters to the violent controls of systemic state policy (1995: viii, 1, emphasis added). Here, the complex interactions of a ‘dissective’ scientific discourse with the slow violences of systemic patriarchal capitalism will be traced, to consider how bodies of all kinds – human and non-­ human – are ‘broken’ to bring them under control.

Necropolitics and violent bodily control Sawday has argued that the brutal dissection of people, things and ideas emerges from the development of an ‘autoptic vision’ (1995: 1), an emphasis that is

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evident in the dissective focus of the Cartesian method. The definition of the autoptic points to criticality and objectivity; its origins in the Greek autopsia emphasizes the ‘act of seeing with one’s own eyes’ that suggests a desire to act as a ‘witness’ to the ‘truth’ of things. And this is certainly the way in which we interpret the autoptic in the early twenty-­first century, as a striving for ‘truth’ and ‘fact’. Yet these very definitions conceal the violent nature of the autoptic, concealing likewise the violent nature of any culture built upon dissective principles. And this can be seen in the dissective and autoptic nature of Almanac’s cultures: in Beaufrey’s videos of bodies that are broken and taken to pieces and their ever-­growing market; in the enthusiastic reception of David’s images of Eric’s violent suicide; and in the harvesting and sale of human blood and organs by Trigg’s Bio-Materials Inc. If we accept that Almanac’s cultures – and by extension, our own extra-­textual cultures – are indeed dissective and autoptic, then we engage directly with what Michel Foucault termed ‘biopower’: ‘the privilege [of the elites] to seize hold of life in order to suppress it’ (1998: 136). Foucault’s notion of biopower traces and reflects the developments and ideologies of science, emulating the ways that the newly mechanized science interpreted ‘the body as a machine’ and subsequently disciplined that body via a series of ‘regulatory controls’ drawn from the observed ‘biological processes’ such as reproduction, mortality, health and longevity (1998: 139). Biopower therefore traced ‘how . . . modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species’, as outlined in Linnaeus’s taxonomies, to create a ‘set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy . . . of power’ or biopolitics (2007: 1). As Foucault persuasively argued, the ideologies of biopolitics enabled, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ that was ‘without question an indispensable element’ in the creation of the kinds of the obedient human bodies required by ‘the development of capitalism’ (1998: 140, 141). Here, one inevitably thinks back to Almanac’s ‘deformed’ bodies that were discussed in Chapter 2, which were purposefully broken ‘to fit inside factory machinery’ (1991: 312). As these broken textual bodies were subsequently ‘worked to death’ to ‘make a rich man richer’ (1991: 312), more recent developments in biopolitical thinking that introduce the notion of ‘necropolitics’ as a ‘politics of death’ are even more pertinent to my analysis here. Achille Mbembe’s theorization of ‘necropolitics’ moves beyond the Foucauldian notion of the sovereign’s or state’s ‘right to kill’ those citizens who transgress laws or pose a threat, arguing that ‘the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (2003: 39–40). In Mbembe’s conceptualization, biopolitics gives way to necropolitics to more fully consider the rights of a sovereign or state to kill its own citizens and others outside the nation, and an extension of our critical understandings of ‘death’ to include a variety of ‘living deaths’ evident in violent forms of bodily control such as colonization and slavery. Most

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importantly, Mbembe argued that this politics of death operates ‘in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-­worlds’ and of ‘new and unique forms of social existence’ such as colonization and enslavement ‘in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’, and so located and trapped in a state between life and death (2003: 40, original emphasis). The vast majority of the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged textual characters are inhabiting exactly this kind of static and ossified ‘living death’ within Almanac’s pages, presenting us with a series of powerful and disturbing ‘death-­worlds’. These oppressed characters have their ‘inferiority’ manufactured and imposed upon them by Almanac’s elite vampire capitalists and homosocial patriarchs, who have the power to make them ‘different’ and so re-­define them as ‘human debris’ or ‘refuse’ (1991: 444). Throughout the text, we see the creative ways in which groups of humans are kept firmly in their place via a naturalized logic of inequality that allows systemic violence to be directed against individual bodies. The inherent racism of Galton’s logic of inequality is thus evident in the violent and racist policies and reflections of a variety of textual characters in positions of power. One of the most interesting is Trigg. Paralysed in a car accident, Trigg replicates and reiterates established textual and extra-­textual ableist social prejudices, while simultaneously asserting his own power – especially over those lower in the social hierarchy – as a means by which he can himself evade categorization as socially ‘undesirable’. It is, notably, Trigg who uses the terms ‘debris’ and ‘refuse’ as a means by which to distinguish himself from the socially undesirable and so highlight his own value and elite status. And so, in direct contradiction of the hierarchies of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy that defines disability as a ‘mark’ of undesirability, Trigg asserts that ‘I see myself as being superior to . . . others’ (1991: 386). In her consideration of the figure of Trigg, Ann Folwell Stanford argued that it is ‘Trigg’s own precarious social position as a potential social throw-­away that adds to his virulence’ (2003: 187). It is a virulence that speaks volumes of Trigg’s desire to avoid the ‘death-­worlds’ inhabited by the ‘living dead’ that are the destination assigned to him by his disability within Galton’s naturalized logic of inequality. Paradoxically, and ironically, Trigg’s virulence also speaks volumes of his determination to break the bodies of others as a means by which to re-­ inscribe and strengthen his own position within the textual hierarchy. While I have already discussed Trigg and his medical markets extensively in Chapter 2, it is worth briefly revisiting Trigg’s motivations to think through how he attempts to re-­define his disability to his own advantage, and how this re-­ definition depends in large part on his own preying on other human bodies also defined as ‘undesirable’. Trigg’s construction of his own disability is noteworthy, as it both replicates and refutes the kinds of established ableist discrimination evident in Max Blue’s definition of him as ‘[s]teak-­in-the-­basket’ simply because he ‘loathed Trigg for being paralysed’ (1991: 378, 379). Trigg’s parents and their friends likewise identify him as ‘handicap[ped]’, Trigg identifies himself as a

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‘crippl[e]’, and he pointedly repeats the phrase ‘[t]he chair is not me. The chair is not part of me’ (1991: 394, 385, 383). Acting as a mantra to focus his mind, this repeated phrase exposes how Trigg’s capitalist ventures are driven by his overwhelming desire to ‘finance . . . the costs of the breakthrough technology’ that will ‘rewir[e]’ his body and brain and so remove the threat to his elite position within Almanac’s brutal social hierarchy. As Max Blue tellingly comments ‘ “Wheelies” had something to prove. . . . the need was absolute’ (1991: 379). Indeed, Trigg’s overwhelming anxiety about his ‘new’ place within Almanac’s ableist hierarchy is evident in his blunt question, ‘[a]ren’t cripples lower than niggers?’ (1991: 385). Paradoxically, this anxiety results in the ‘virulence’ with which Trigg aligns himself with the eugenic ideologies of elite individuals such as Serlo, who aspires to create the genetically perfect human specimen because the ‘only useful function’ of the masses of social undesirables is as ‘organ donors’ (1991: 560). Trigg thus also identifies the harvesting of body parts as the perfect business opportunity for making profit from ‘human debris’, and the ideological alignment itself can be interpreted as acting as a form of protection against Trigg’s potential ‘throw-­away’ in a social hierarchy that is profoundly ableist (1991: 560). The business proposal that Trigg puts to Leah for a series of ‘high-­ tech medical care facilities’ is therefore explicitly exploitative (1991: 382). Including an ‘addiction treatment center’ and ‘the first luxury community designed for the handicapped’, Trigg’s planned medical facilities demonstrate his desire to profit from – and, even more importantly, to be seen to profit from – ‘the millions and millions to be made’ from disability (1991: 382). Trigg’s business ventures, including his blood and organ harvesting business, are clearly driven by the eugenic ideologies with which Trigg himself identifies. Yet, like Beaufrey’s videos, Trigg’s business operations act to trace the ways in which scientific and medical discourses both enable and facilitate the interests of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy. As Michelle Jarman has commented, the exploitative nature of Trigg’s medical facilities and his organ harvesting business expose the point at which ‘[t]he logic of eugenics becomes solidified by capitalism’, where, like the industrial machines hungry for broken bodies already discussed, ‘human beings serve (and are served up [for]) the primacy of profit’ (2006: 152). While Jarman rightly argued that Trigg ‘reiterates several problematic disability stereotypes’, it is clear from the logic of the text that his excessive dependence on and trust in scientific research and medical technologies is the real problem to which Silko points (2006: 152). And this is evident in Trigg’s ‘adamant’ belief in ‘the eventual miracle of modern science and high technology for spinal-­cord injuries and nerve tissue replants’ (1991: 380). For Trigg, it was ‘only a matter of time’ before he ‘would be out of the chair’ (1991: 380). Trigg’s adamant belief in medical science demonstrates, as Stanford has noted, an ‘unfailing trust in [medical] technology’ that marks Trigg himself as a figure that is ‘legitimized by, supported by, and [so] necessary to medicine’

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(2003: 187, emphasis added). It is, Stanford asserts, through figures such as Trigg that ‘Silko brings together her critique of medicine’s profit motive, its uncritical reliance upon the power of technology, and its reproduction of oppressive systems, behaviours, and attitudes’ (2003: 189). It comes as no surprise to Silko’s reader that Trigg identifies surgeons at the medical school as his ‘silent partners’ who ‘made millions with their heart and lung transplant racket’ and were greedier ‘than the lowest street addicts’ (1991: 751). It is via the figure of Trigg that the operations and exchanges of patriarchal capitalism and scientific discourse are exposed. While Trigg’s ‘necessity’ to science/medicine lies in large part in his role as a key component of the supply chain, it is also clear that his ‘necessity’ lies also in his ‘uncritical reliance upon the power of technology’. As readers, we are therefore encouraged to consider how ‘[t]his unfailing trust in technology becomes a key element in the ongoing self-­destruction of EuroAmericans’ within the text (Stanford 2003: 191). Given the extensive interactions between Silko’s text and its contexts, I would argue that we are also encouraged to make extra-­textual connections: to think through how this lack of critical thinking, this uncritical acceptance of the ‘truth’ and ‘veracity’ of science, this acceptance of the ways in which science has historically ‘naturalized’ itself as a discourse, also problematically applies to our own extra-­textual twenty-­firstcentury worlds. And, if we are not entirely yet persuaded by Trigg, or by his satisfyingly ironic death at the hands of the homeless ‘living dead’ that he has exploited who ‘smashed’ his skull and ‘neatly arranged’ his body alongside the human ‘bio-­materials’ from which he had profited, there is another cautionary example provided in the figure of the Indigenous Mexican Menardo (1991: 750, 751). As I discussed in Chapter 2, Menardo’s Indigenous heritage means that, like Trigg, his position is precarious within Almanac’s social hierarchies. While he is one of the Mexican elites who socializes with General J. and the torture video-­making Mexican Police Chief as part of the ‘El Grupo Gun Club’, Menardo is continually fearful that his ‘undesirable’ social origins will be exposed (1991: 330). Menardo’s fear, a product surely of the violent controls of his dissective culture, leads to his increasing obsession with the protective scientific technologies represented by the ‘bulletproof vest’ he is given by Sonny Blue as a ‘little gift’ (1991: 317). As Menardo becomes more fearful of his potential to slip into the ‘death-­worlds’ of the ‘living dead’, he becomes fixated with the vest as an example of the ‘finest body armor made’ and so a symbol of ‘the triumph of modern science’ that has the ability to produce a ‘wonder fabric’ that ‘stopped all bullets and knife blades’ (1991: 319, 497). As his wife Alegría teasingly accuses him of ‘fondling’ the vest, it is made clear to Silko’s reader that Menardo’s lack of critical thinking has enabled his own seduction by the promises of scientific technology (1991: 325). We are, therefore, shown that Menardo’s seduction is dependent upon blind trust: ‘[a]ll of it was a matter of trust – trust of the high technology that had woven the vest fibers . . . Trust. Menardo had repeated the word over and over until he was asleep’, much like Trigg’s mantra (1991: 497, original emphasis). As Menardo’s

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reliance upon the vest becomes so absolute that he wears it at all times and even sleeps in it, Menardo ignores the visible warning signs represented by ‘the insert that belongs in the pocket over his heart [that] does not lie flat’ and so suggests a fault of some kind, instead placing his trust in the persuasively ‘expensive’ instruction brochure with its ‘exhilarating’ depictions of numerous successful scientific ballistic tests (1991: 319, 324, 325). In the figure of Menardo, Almanac’s dissective and autoptic cultures coalesce, as Menardo’s blind ‘trust’ coupled with his arrogance as a member of the text’s elite capitalist patriarchs pushes him to conduct his own ‘live’ scientific ballistic test of the vest. In an attempt to impress the other elite members of the El Grupo Club, and believing himself to be ‘invincible with the magic of high technology’, Menardo arranges for his Indigenous chauffeur Tacho to ‘shoot him in the chest’ at point-­blank range, only to find that the ‘miracle of . . . technology’ fails due to ‘[m]icroscopic imperfections in the fabric’s quilting’ (1991: 503, 507, 509). Menardo’s death, therefore, provides a cautionary tale within Silko’s text; pointing, as Stanford has argued, to the fact that it is ‘Menardo’s trust in the vest that undoes him, as does absolute trust in any technology’ (2003: 193, emphasis added). Menardo’s desire to control death, his desire to gain and retain power over life and death, can be clearly related to the kinds of power evident in the exchanges and interactions between necropolitics and eugenic thinking, each of which informs and is informed by the other. As Jarman has argued, Almanac demonstrates how ‘eugenic thinking itself brings forth this insatiable, lustful hunger for power over life and death’ (2006: 157). This necropolitical insatiability for power over life and death can be seen to combine with the inherent racism of Galton’s logic of inequality in the figure of the Mexican General J. Commenting directly on the Nazi heritage of Galton’s eugenic theories, General J. compares Nazi death camps with late-­twentieth-century refugee camps to argue that the ‘problem’ with the death camps was their ‘incriminating’ nature: they were simply too visible (1991: 495). General J.’s alternative suggests that ‘bands of illegal refugees trying to make a run for it should be gunned down from the air like coyotes or wolves’ subject to ‘quick annihilation on the spot, far, far from satellite TV cameras’ (1991: 495). General J.’s specific focus, upon the large numbers of ‘Indians’ who have entered Mexico from the south, here replicates the death-­worlds that have been imposed on the majority of Indigenous societies in the Americas since the fifteenth century by European groups who have constructed themselves as social ‘elites’ and Indigenous groups (among others) as bodies to be broken and made obedient. Within this bloody history of conquest, this five-­hundred-year ‘Indian Wa[r]’ that has ‘never ended’ that Silko addresses so directly, it is no coincidence that General J. is wedded to violent forms of control or that he believes that blood is a ‘natural’ aphrodisiac: when the general ‘speculate[s] that the sight and smell of blood excited the human organs’, Menardo suspects he sees ‘a suspicious bulge in the general’s trousers’ (1991: map legend, 337). General J. is, therefore, a firm advocate of

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violent necropolitical control via bodily punishment; and he reflects openly on the practical Nazi deployments of Galton’s theoretical legacies in the construction and ideological purposes of the death camps built to eradicate those identified as socially ‘undesirable’. Here, again, text collides with extra-­textual context, as the general argues that the Jewish bodies that survived the death camps ‘carried cruel memories for years and years’, noting that it is ‘when the Jews thought they were home free, and safe’ that ‘the time bomb’ set by the Nazi torture programme ‘went off and they committed suicide’ (1991: 338). General J.’s argument is profoundly dissective and autoptic, asserting that torture works because it is the ‘memory’ that is attached to ‘[t]ortured nerves and veins’ that ensures that ‘the body remembers’ (1991: 338, emphasis added). General J.’s consideration of the bodily memory of trauma clearly engages with extra-­textual popular and scholarly understandings of the effects and longevity of post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in individuals, which was beginning to be more fully explored during the time of Almanac’s composition in the 1980s. Yet twenty-­first-century readers can also retrospectively read this conceptualization of the bodily memory of trauma in terms of its systemic group effects; and it is notable that the traumatic bodily memories of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have, since Almanac’s publication, prompted far-­ranging psychiatric examinations of the nature of individual trauma, and the existence of inherited or intergenerational trauma among subsequent generations. Recent, twenty-­first-century studies have concluded not only that ‘intergenerational trauma may be real’ but that ‘trauma may be woven into [human] DNA’, altering individual and familial bodies and bodily structures for generations to come (Pember 2015). If we consider this through a necropolitical lens, then this has profound implications for our understandings of the bodily memories resulting from the ‘death-­ worlds’ imposed upon those subject to colonization and enslavement in the Americas. And it has profound implications for our understandings of the intergenerational legacies of such trauma on the familial descendants who remain deeply traumatized and who, via the impact on their DNA, remain physically marked by the static and ossified ‘living dead’ status imposed on their ancestors. While the medical sciences are now beginning to develop an understanding of the intergenerational bodily effects of trauma, it seems appropriate to consider the intergenerational intellectual effects of the imposition of a ‘naturalized’ logic of inequality. Accordingly, the next section will provide an examination of how the ideological scientific categories that inform (and are informed by) established power systems and violent forms of control are naturalized through their dissemination. This chapter will therefore conclude with a consideration of the ways in which academic discourses disseminate naturalized and imposed hierarchies through their authority to create hierarchies, define ‘difference’ and construct ‘otherness’; and how this authority is itself a form of systemic violence.

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Academic discourse as intellectual violence My exploration here of the roles played by academic disciplines in the dissemination of naturalized scientific social and natural hierarchies is, of course, directly linked to the operations of science discussed in the previous section. Like science, academia exists to produce and disseminate ‘knowledge’, with an emphasis on objectivity. Yet, as can be seen in the very notion of knowledge production, there is a danger that what we identify as ‘knowledge’ – in other words, ‘the body of truth, information and principles acquired by humankind’, or ‘the condition of apprehending truth or fact through reasoning’ – does not recognize or even allow for the possibility that knowledge might be ‘manufactured’, might not in fact be ‘true’. Although academic disciplines – especially the sciences – assert their objectivity and insist upon the ‘truth’ and ‘factuality’ of their findings, the very scholarly terminology upon which they rely would suggest otherwise. For instance, although a term such as ‘theory’ derives from the Greek theōria and theōrein to denote ‘a form of seeing’ and is used by academic disciplines to disseminate ‘scientifically acceptable general principles’, there is little acknowledgement within the sciences that a ‘theory’ is not a fact but rather an ‘hypothesis’, whose etymological origins are in the Greek hypotithenai, ‘to suppose’. Scientific and other academic theories are therefore more accurately hypothetical ‘suppositions’; rather than truths, they are ‘plausible explanations’, ‘unproven’ or ‘tentative assumptions’, ‘conjectures’ and ‘speculations’. Neither does our concept of ‘knowledge’ recognize or allow for the fact that knowledge might not be value- or context-­free. It does not, for example, address the very real concerns, discussed in the previous section, that have been raised over the implications of ‘infectious ideas’, or over the inbuilt ‘epistemological and prejudicial pitfalls’ of modern knowledge systems (Briers 2009; Kevles 2016: 48). It is therefore important to remember that academic ‘theories’ can also be defined as ‘beliefs’ or ‘policies’ and ‘procedures’. Above all, our concept of knowledge and knowledge production does not address the complex and problematic histories that link the emergence of academic ‘disciplines’ with key developments in patriarchal capitalism or imperialism, and with the ideological imposition of newly mechanized scientific worldviews. One of my chief considerations here, therefore, is to read Almanac’s textual disciplines through a tracing of how the emergence of formal academic disciplines from the late eighteenth century occurred as a direct response to these developments; how, for instance, academic disciplines developed as a means by which new ideological mechanistic worldviews could be disseminated as a form of naturalized ‘truth’. As Edward Said argued in his foundational 1978 study Orientalism, an academic discipline such as ‘orientalism’ had explicitly imperial origins in its formulation and development as a ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’, and it dealt with the Orient ‘by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism . . . [was] a Western style for dominating,

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restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (1995: 3). Said very pertinently argues that it is only through an understanding of the construction and dissemination of academic discourse that we can fully understand ‘the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’ (1995: 3, emphasis added). And, of course, Said’s argument is applicable to other academic disciplines more widely. From Said’s analysis, it is evident that academic knowledge production disseminated via academic discourse can be deployed as a form of violence. And, if we consider Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s assertion that, for colonized peoples subject to Western knowledge systems and forms of academic discourse, this violence can be equated to an ideological ‘colonization of the mind’, then it is equally evident that academic discourse also can, and does, exert a violent control over minds (1986). Moreover, this violent intellectual control can be traced in the imposition of the Cartesian method that separated mind from body: if the body is to be subject to violent forms of control, then by that same logic, the mind must also be made obedient. It is no coincidence that this violent intellectual control actively supported and facilitated the kinds of ideological social hierarchies that are established via the naturalized logic of inequality. While Ngugi has noted that this kind of ‘mental control’ is essential to ‘[e]conomic and political control’ within the colonization process, in this context of imposed social categories and hierarchies, he has also stated that in order ‘[t]o control a people’s culture’ it is crucial to also ‘control their tools of self-­definition in relationships with others’ (1986: 16). Within the dissective cultures of Almanac, we can see that those tools of self-­definition are firmly and often violently controlled, not only by a small number of elite vampire capitalists, but also through systemic academic discourses, resulting in the majority of the textual characters being locked into a series of oppressive and potentially inescapable death-­worlds, robbed even of hope. The intellectual violences and controls effected via academia have been very thoroughly assessed and theorized by Foucault, the far-­reach of academia’s influence demonstrated by his own recurrent analysis of the topic in the majority of his key works. Some of the problems that can be identified are clearly evident in the definition and etymological origins of the term ‘discipline’, suggesting that these problems are inbuilt into empirical Cartesian knowledge systems. The definition of ‘discipline’ suggests a range of intrinsic values: although the term derives from the Latin disciplina, teaching or learning, it is also directly related to discipulas, a pupil, and so to historical and contemporary European understandings that are informed by and inseparable from the fundamental ideological values of Christianity. Within the dictionary definition itself, there are a range of implicit and often explicit understandings of control: while a discipline is, as academia understands and uses the term, a ‘field of study’ and a form of ‘instruction’, it is also a ‘system of rules’, a form of ‘training’ that ‘corrects’ both mind and ‘moral character’, a method of ‘prescribed conduct’,

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and the ‘control’ that is ‘gained by enforcing obedience’. As Armin Krishnan has argued, ‘ “discipline” also means policing certain behaviours or ways of thinking’ (2009: 8). Discipline is also, notably, a form of ‘punishment’, and it is in this sense that Foucault most influentially engages with the term in his seminal 1975 study Discipline and Punish as part of his ongoing and developing analyses of the operations of biopower and biopolitics. If, as Foucault persuasively argued, the operations of a physical ‘discipline’ produced ‘subjected’ and ‘docile’ bodies, then, by extension, it can be argued that academic ‘disciplines’ produce equally subjected and docile minds. In terms of academic ‘training’ and the ‘production’ of academics, it is notable that the term ‘academic discipline’ most usually connotes, as Krishnan has commented, ‘a form of specific and rigorous scientific training that will turn out practitioners who have been “disciplined” by their “discipline” for their own good’ (2009: 8, emphasis added). Krishnan’s emphasis here on science points to the origins of our contemporary understanding of academic disciplines that can be traced back to the early seventeenth century and the ‘scientific revolution’. The transformation of intellectual study caused by the ‘scientific revolution’, and the introduction of ‘modern’ forms of academic disciplines, has its origins therefore in an ideological process that promoted the significance of the mind over that of the body and the natural world, and which – as a direct consequence – imposed and naturalized dangerously imbalanced ideological social and natural hierarchies. As I discussed in the previous section in my considerations of the ‘hypotheses’ of Descartes, Linnaeus, Morton and Galton, scientific theory has been profoundly and sometimes disturbingly influential, and a key part of its influence has been achieved through its dissemination and popular acceptance. While Almanac makes clear the problematic legacies of science and scientific thinking, Silko also widens her focus to consider the ideologies informing the practices of anthropology and museology, and the production of ‘history’. Even more importantly, Almanac also engages with what we identify as the ‘Earth sciences’, or the branches of science dedicated to an analysis of the Earth, to think through the problematic historical and contemporary relationships between cartography and geology. It can be argued that, due to the ways in which academic theories are disseminated and made natural, they are themselves forms of ‘slow violence’, their effects so insidious and long-­lasting, and their conclusions so widely accepted as ‘fact’, that – like the many forms of violent control encountered so far – they are difficult, if not impossible, to contradict or challenge. This is especially problematic when those academic discourses are founded upon principles that have been proven to be fundamentally prejudiced and prejudicial, which drew upon existing ideological ideas to reinforce and justify existing social prejudices. As I have already noted, this was certainly the case with Morton’s theories of craniology and with Galton’s theories of eugenics. While it is easy to point to both Morton and Galton as individual aberrations within a field that continues to construct itself as purely objective because it is

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value- and context-­free, it can nonetheless be argued that both Morton and Galton represent examples of wider systemic problems that saturate academia at every level because ideological discrimination and prejudice are the unspoken and unacknowledged principles upon which academia was founded. And this can be seen in Almanac’s carefully chosen textual examples that engage with the contentious history of anthropology in the United States, which emerged as a discipline directly out of the work of Morton; with the implicitly imperial practices of American museology, which has historically identified Indigenous peoples as part of ‘natural history’ rather than human or cultural history; with history’s claims of objectivity, while it nonetheless wrote only the stories of dominant cultures and made invisible any dissenting voices; with cartography’s claim to be apolitical, even though it was complicit in the imperial drive for colonization and the subjugations of colonized lands and peoples; and with geology’s facilitation of wide-­ranging state and corporate abuses of the natural world. All of Silko’s examples in this instance derive from the specific historical experiences of a range of subjugated Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The text begins, for instance, with a consideration of the far-­reaching effects of the historical ‘theft’ of Indigenous artefacts, the ‘stone idols’ of the Laguna (1991: 31). The stone figures embody and display the collision of worldviews in the text, contrasting the worlds informed by Cartesian hierarchies and patriarchal capitalism with an Indigenous understanding of relatedness, reciprocity and obligation required for successful sustainable living. According to the museum that displays the artefacts, these are ‘lithic pieces’, and the deliberate use of this term is both geological to denote their composition from stone, and archaeological to imply – via timescale – the uncertain or unproven nature of their relationship to the contemporary Laguna who claim them. The authority of the museum is depicted as absolute: its own sound scientific credentials are evident in its naming as ‘the museum of the Laboratory of Anthropology’, which suggests that it has a variety of functions as a place of scientific experimentation, a place that studies human cultures and cultural values, and a place where the scientific and cultural knowledge that it has produced can be disseminated to the public (1991: 33). Moreover, its authority is equally evident in its assertion that the stone pieces cannot be stolen because they ‘had been donated to the Laboratory by a distinguished patron whose reputation was beyond reproach’, despite the ‘alar[m]’ shown by the assistant curator at his suspicions that the Laguna visitors ‘had come to take everything back that had been stolen’ (1991: 33). In direct contrast to this manufactured form of knowledge, the Laguna are shown to have a very different relationship to the stone figures. This relationship refutes the ‘objective’ and objectifying anthropological gaze of the museum that acts to empty the stone figures of any meaning and so keep firm the separation between human and nature. Rather than ‘lithic pieces’, the Laguna view the stone figures as ‘little grandparents’ and ‘esteemed and beloved ancestors’, explicitly tracing the links between human

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and natural world, and the literal relatedness of the two. The museum’s implicit denial of the historic relationship of the stones to the tribe is also challenged, as the figures that are as ‘[o]ld as the earth itself ’ are shown to have been under the ‘protection and care’ of ‘[g]eneration after generation’ of Laguna who ‘tenderly’ feed their ‘spirits’ (1991: 31). The theft of the figures, still felt keenly ‘eighty years’ later, continues to cause the Laguna ‘anguish’ and acts to emphasize the artificiality of the imposed separation of the human from the natural world. As the Laguna characters assert, ‘these were not merely carved stones, these were beings formed by the hands of the kachina spirits’ and so their life force is sacred (1991: 33, original emphasis). Predictably, it is via a violent form of intellectual and hierarchical control that the museum reasserts its authority: although the museum ‘had received and was in possession of stolen property’ according to ‘[t]he white man’s laws’ under which ‘[n]ot even an innocent buyer got title of ownership to stolen property’, the authority of the museum and the hierarchical ‘reputation’ of the elite donor means that neither can be held legally accountable, and so we see that the law within Almanac simply does not apply to its hierarchical elites (1991: 33). Within this example, we can thus detect the ways in which museological display, the construction and consumption of culture, and the dissemination of ‘knowledge’ work in conjunction with one another to produce a form of violent intellectual control that resists any form of challenge. This violent intellectual control is equally evident in Almanac’s consideration of the workings of the academic discipline of history, which in the text can be clearly seen to be producing material that is allied with the ideological aims of the patriarchal capitalist state. In this sense, the ‘black Indian’ Clinton, a former Vietnam veteran and leader of the ‘Army of the Homeless’ in the United States, is well aware of the constructed and manufactured nature of ‘history’ (1992: 404, 396). Clinton argues, for instance, that the ‘slave masters had tried to strip the Africans of everything – their languages and histories’ (1991: 416). By linking language with history, Clinton here exposes that our understanding of our own histories is fundamental to our identity, and the removal of those histories is profoundly culturally and individually damaging. As can be seen throughout the text, this has far-­ranging implications for the vast numbers of characters trapped in the ‘death-­worlds’ of the text whose histories have been over-­written and erased, or even re-­written with a story more palatable to Almanac’s patriarchal capitalist elites. Importantly, what those elites want to suppress are the lengthy histories of the acts of genocide that have been directed against Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and African Americans in the Americas. As Clinton comments, he wants ‘black Americans to know how deeply African blood had watered the soil of the Americas for five hundred years’ in order to fully understand the ways in which authorized histories operate on the behalf of national narratives to deny the experiences of the oppressed. As Homi K. Bhabha has noted, such authorized forms of history are founded upon ‘a strange forgetting of . . . the nation’s past’, and so authorized history constitutes a ‘forgetting to remember’ (1990: 310). In the context of the

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United States, this is clearly the case from the very inception of history as an academic discipline: writing in 1832, Alexis de Tocqueville pertinently commented that American historians followed what he defined as a ‘doctrine of necessity’, whereby ‘it is not enough to show what events have occurred: they wish to show that events could not have occurred otherwise’ (1966: 88, emphasis added). It is this doctrine of necessity, this strange forgetting, that ensures the normalization and acceptance of imposed social hierarchies, and naturalizes the logic of inequality. Importantly, these authorized historical narratives also deny and erase the cultures of the oppressed: through the textual operations of historical narra­tives, it is evident that Almanac’s elites also want to suppress wider stories of African cultural origins and of African acts of resistance in the New World. Demonstrating the ways in which history as a discipline works as a violent form of intellectual control, we see how slavery has been justified via a denial and an eradication of the richness and achievements of African cultures in authorized American histories that fail to mention the ‘African kings [who] had built great empires’, the ‘African metallurgists [who] had created great works in iron’, the ‘African mathematicians [who] had created the zero, [the] key to higher mathematics’, and the ‘African astronomers [who] charted the planets and the stars’ (1991: 419). The intellectual violence of authorized history is especially evident in its eradication of the sheer volume of historical African and Indigenous acts of resistance that challenged their subjugation. This is a crucial point, since the inclusion of such historical narratives would work explicitly against the manufactured and imposed ideological hierarchies of the patriarchal capitalist system by allowing the oppressed hope: as Clinton comments, the knowledge of their true histories would allow those subjugated within Almanac’s worlds of living death to feel ‘hopeful and proud’ (1991: 422). What Clinton’s analysis of history shows us as readers is how authorized history both sanctions and enacts the oppressive hierarchies of the state and so, as a direct result, acts to prevent any resistance to this naturalized logic of inequality. As Clinton pertinently comments, one of the reasons he wants African Americans to know their full history is because it will create the kind of outrage and rage required for true resistance: ‘[t]he powers that controlled the United States didn’t want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up’ (1991: 431). It is in this context of uprising, of Revolucíon, that Almanac’s analysis of authorized histories becomes especially interesting, as we are shown the ways in which a variety of powerful conflicting textual political interests nonetheless promote identical views of historicized hierarchies. Alongside the authorized national histories produced by the patriarchal vampire capitalists, we therefore also see the reproduction of almost identical discriminatory hierarchical ideologies produced by the white ‘revolutionaries’ of the text such as those teaching in the Cuban ‘Marxist school’ in Mexico City, and, above all, in the figure of the Cuban revolutionary Bartolomeo. Bartolomeo quite clearly

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displays many of the prejudices – racism, sexism – evident in Almanac more widely, failing to treat the Indigenous leader Angelita La Escapía with any respect, and demonstrating this disrespect through his persistent dismissal of Indigenous ideological concepts. But the figure of Bartolomeo is primarily significant for his role in Almanac’s most powerful exploration of the ‘crimes’ of history as a discipline (1991: 315). It is, therefore, via the figure of Bartolomeo that we can see how Cuban revolutionary history within the text is shown to have been constructed and manufactured to subjugate and oppress, and – perhaps most ironically – to reinforce and justify that same established naturalized logic of inequality that, extra-­textually, Marx himself challenged. Blinded by his devotion to Cuban revolutionary history, Bartolomeo believes absolutely that ‘[b]efore Fidel, history did not exist’, effectively erasing entire Indigenous Caribbean histories (1991: 315). And it is because of his profound ‘disdain’ for the Indigenous history of Cuba, because he ‘had no respect for the true history of Cuba’, that Bartolomeo is presented as committing not only ‘crimes against history’ but specifically the ‘crimes against tribal history’ that will eventually lead to his death – as I will discuss more fully from the point of view of Angelita La Escapía in Chapter  7 (1991: 315). Like the authorized histories for which he provides an example, Bartolomeo is open in his contemptuous assertion that ‘[j]ungle monkeys and savages have no history’ (1991: 525, emphasis added). History thus belongs to Almanac’s ‘civilized’ hierarchical elites, who maintain their privilege through their authority to define who belongs with them in that category. The figure of Bartolomeo is highly significant as an embodiment of the prejudices that drive the logic of inequality, and also the ways in which authorized history deploys that same logic to sustain and maintain existing social hierarchies. As Silko’s text clearly notes, Bartolomeo is representative of ‘[m]ore than five hundred years of white men’ in the Americas (1991: 526). In this sense, Almanac exposes the ways in which authorized history imposes an intellectual violence that refuses to allow alternative stories, or what Daria Donnelly has identified as ‘unauthorized marginal storytellers’ (1999: 248). This violent intellectual control is equally evident in the final examples that I will consider here: the related and potentially collusive and exploitative disciplines of geography in its incarnation as cartography and geology. Indeed, obscure and perhaps obscured collusive disciplinary relationships need to be recognized because, as Miriam Kahn has argued, ‘history is most precise when it is geography’ (1996: 193–4). And Silko herself points to this when she comments, in an interview with Laura Coltelli, that maps are ‘made out of [historical] narratives’ that are themselves ‘inextricably bound to certain geographic locations’ (1992–3: 65). This understanding of cartography and cartographic practice as a means of imperial inscription, as a way by which the naturalized logic of inequality can be both established and maintained, is emphasized by Louis Owens, who has argued that maps are a form of historical discourse, a dissemination of the findings of history that enact intellectual

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violence by ‘writ[ing] the conquerors’ stories over the stories of the conquered’ (1994, in Vizenor 1998: 170). Significantly, like the majority of scientific discourse, cartography professes to represent the ‘real’. Yet cartographic ‘reality’ is far from simplistic, the decisions made about what is represented and what is elided, or made absent, on the map are undeniably political. As Simon Ryan has stressed, maps represent a ‘double movement, of erasure and projection’ (1994: 124). In this sense, it can be argued that maps and the act of mapping actively construct reality: maps, as Geoff King has argued, ‘create rather than merely represent the ground on which they rest’ (1996: rear cover text, emphasis added); and so, as James Corner has commented, mapping is ‘never neutral, passive or without consequence’ (1999: 216). In this sense, maps actively trace, represent, and actively make present, meaning; or, to employ Jean Baudrillard’s celebrated formulation, it is ‘the map that . . . engenders the territory’ (1994: 2). As Ryan has commented, the map thus facilitates ‘the projection and subsequent emplacement of a new order’ (1994: 116); underscoring the power that maps have, according to Jeremy Black, ‘to represent and advance agendas’ (1997: 9, emphasis added). What we see, therefore, in Almanac is the inclusion of a map as a frontispiece, where Silko exposes the obscured links between the seemingly separate disciplines of history and geography: Almanac’s geographical map is, notably, historical, a ‘five hundred year map’ (1991: map legend). Importantly, the map also exposes the ‘imaginary lines’ of cartographic intellectual violence that have been ideologically inscribed on the American land (1991: 214). And thus in direct contradiction of cartography’s claims to be objective, value- and context-­free, the Yaqui character Calabazas bluntly comments that imposed geographical and national ‘borders’ are examples of ‘what isn’t real’ (1991: 216, emphasis added). As King has argued in his study Mapping Reality, ‘[t]he power to draw or [to] re-­draw the map is a considerable one, involving . . . the power to define . . . what is or is not real’ (1996: 16). Presented as an example of the criticality and objectivity of science, Almanac’s cartography is rather an example of how the autoptic vision of the dissective textual cultures actively produces and maintains its death-­worlds. Almanac therefore traces how the intellectual violence of academic discourse has concrete human effects as violent control is effected through the dissemination of that discourse. Importantly, those effects also impact upon the natural world, and it is notable that geography and its physical manifestation or dissemination as cartography are both also related to the ideological concerns and interests of geology. Defined as a science ‘that deals with the history of the earth and its life especially as recorded in rocks’, the discipline geology is exposed as both ironic and contradictory within the text since it becomes painfully clear that the ‘life’ of the Earth does not – indeed, according to Cartesian principles cannot – include human life. As I have already noted, the ‘life’ of rocks is simply not recognized by any textual example of academic discourse. Via Almanac’s discussion of geology, we can further see how the dissemination of academic discourse naturalizes and enacts an intellectual

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violence over the natural world. In keeping with the kinds of oppressive hierarchies already under consideration, it should be noted that – according to Cartesian principles and to Linnaean taxonomies – the natural world is right at the very bottom in terms of its significance. Given the ways in which science has historically denied any sense of relationship or relatedness between humans and the natural world, and how that denial has itself been presented as ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ and so normalized, this hierarchical positioning of the natural world inevitably results in its domination and exploitation. It enacts the dominion demanded by Genesis, and extends that dominion further into domination. As the example of the museum discussed above suggests, academic disciplines have historically denied the life-­force of the natural world and, through this strategy, have so also denied the ways in which humans are related to the natural world. At the very simplest level, humans cannot exist without the Earth; and a damaged, abused and unhealthy environment will make for damaged, abused and unhealthy human beings. As Silko has herself commented, the very definition of the term ‘landscape’ within the English language embodies this ideological Cartesian human–nature separation: ‘ “A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view” does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory he or she surveys’ (1996b: 266, original emphasis). And this ideological separation is most ironically evident in Almanac in the white American geologist who is father to the Yaqui twins Lecha and Zeta. ‘[C]laiming his legal right to them’ when their mother dies, the geologist is depicted as ‘standing apart from the rest’ who ‘simply did not exist for him’ when he encounters his daughters again (1991: 119). The geologist’s mind is thus divided from his body, and from the bodies of all others. The figure of the geologist is clearly presented, like Trigg and Menardo, as a cautionary tale, representative not only of the violent controls enacted by science over the natural world but also, via employment as a specialist for a mining company, of vampire capital’s exploitation of natural resources. In this sense, both geology as a discipline and the mining company as a financial beneficiary of that disciplinary knowledge, can very productively be read as the kinds of dissective cultures with which Almanac concerns itself. In the geologist, therefore, Almanac makes it clear how the damaging practices of scientific research – the reliance upon hierarchies that subjugate the natural world – are harmful not only to the Earth but also to those humans who engage in those processes. Accordingly, the geologist is represented as ‘the detached white man who smiled and spoke and who was a dead man already’ due, much like Menardo, to his absolute trust in harmful ideologies (1991: 121). As Lecha and Zeta’s Yaqui grandmother Yoeme comments, the geologist’s ‘ailment had been common among those who had gone into caverns of fissures in the lava formations . . . . The white man had violated Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart’ (1991: 121). Again, like Menardo, it is notable that the geologist’s trust in his scientific

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method proves not only false but fatal: as the geologist finds himself unable to apply his disciplinary training to successfully ‘read’ the Earth ‘for profit’ for the mining company, it becomes clear for Zeta that the Earth’s ‘veins of silver had dried up because their father, the mining engineer himself, had dried up’ (1991: 120). Pointing to the dangers of an autoptic and dissective worldview, the geologist eventually starves himself to death, his death a literal embodiment of unsustainable scientific and capitalist principles and practices: ‘he . . . consumed himself ’ (1991: 123). It is, notably, also a literal embodiment of the kinds of violent control to which the majority of textual bodies and minds are subjected. Almanac thus traces a series of significant and far-­reaching connections between the emergence of academic disciplines as a means by which to support and facilitate developing patriarchal, capitalist and scientific interests, and how the dissemination of academic discourses has reiterated and enforced existing social hierarchies within a naturalized logic of inequality. Moreover, Almanac makes clear how academic discourses and their dissemination can be seen to be effective via violent forms of intellectual control that facilitate academia’s authority to create hierarchies, define ‘difference’ and construct ‘otherness’. The figure of the geologist is fitting conclusion to this first half of my study, since his actions and so his fate point directly to the concerns of the remaining half, which will provide a detailed analysis of ‘Resistance and Revolucíon’ within Silko’s text. If the figure of the geologist teaches Silko’s readers anything, he teaches us that the autoptic and dissective worldview that currently informs vampire capitalism, homosocial patriarchy, and the discourses of science is not only dangerous but ultimately fatal. Rejecting the notion of relatedness, it is notable that this worldview also rejects any sense of obligation. Since, in Coulthard’s formulation, a sense of obligation – to each other and to the Earth – is essential to our ability to live healthily or sustainably, then it should come as little surprise to Almanac’s readers that, as I have already noted, the requirement to meet our obligations is the driving force of ‘Revolucíon’ in the novel. The next three chapters will, accordingly, explore the workings of ‘Resistance and Revolucíon’ in the text. Beginning with a consideration of resistance to environmental and technological disaster, the first chapter will assess how a recognition and deployment of Indigenous worldviews enables an understanding of the true nature of obligation. This second half of my study will thus trace and explore the ways in which Almanac’s many oppressed are allowed hope.

Notes 1 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980), 290–1. 2 The popularity of public autopsies and scientific experiments from the mid-­ eighteenth century onwards throughout Europe and the United States is clearly

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noteworthy in this instance. See, for example, Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned for an overview of dissection during the European Renaissance; and Sanjib Kumar Ghosh, ‘Human Cadaveric Dissection: A Historical Account from Ancient Greece to the Modern Era’, Anatomy and Cell Biology, 48 (3), 2015: 153–69. 3 Morton’s theories, most famously challenged by Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), remain a site of controversy with Gould’s own interpretations questioned – and so Morton’s original findings surprisingly supported – by scientists as recently as 2011 (see Nicholas Wade, ‘Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim’ (The New York Times, 13 June 2011)). Such scientific disclaimers operate within the premise of the value-­free and yet, problematically and paradoxically, act to uphold scientific theories that are undeniably racist.

Part II R esistance and R evolucíon

Chapter 5 ‘ T he disappearance o f all things E uropean ’ : R evoluc íon and R elatedness

The rewriting of history to allow for an understanding of the world as narrated and an understanding of NatureCulture as one seamless semiotic-­ material process is one key part of Almanac . . .1 As T. V. Reed comments in his important study of Almanac’s many forms of ‘toxic colonialism’, any challenge offered to the established textual patriarchal capitalist narratives must first address the fact that these are narratives, constructed stories told, imposed and enforced by powerful elite characters and systems (2009). The world that Almanac depicts, according to Reed, is a world that is narrated; and the implication is therefore that the characters have the power to change the stories that are told, however powerless those characters might seem within the textual socio-­political systems. The power of stories is everywhere apparent in Almanac, echoing and amplifying Silko’s claim in her earlier novel Ceremony, that ‘you don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories’ (1986: 2). It is via Almanac’s representation of multiple narratives, via its depiction of a range of viable alternative stories that a sense of hope is born in what is otherwise a novel that is profoundly hope-­less. As the first half of this study has demonstrated, it is quite true that Almanac focuses extensively on the brutal oppression and dispossession of the majority of the Earth’s human populations by the few, on the ways in which those trapped in the multiple loveless death-­worlds of the text are denied even any sense of hope. As I have discussed in some detail, Silko’s readers are shown how this oppression operates via a series of powerful interconnected systems that produce worldviews which, because of their fundamental dissectivity, not only refute any sense of human or human–Earth relatedness but, via that very sense of profound disconnection, also actively facilitate widespread abuses of both humans and of the natural world. And as the last chapter argued, the fate of Almanac’s geologist serves as an important focal point here. Performing the ultimate act of consumption, the geologist’s death illustrates the violent controls enacted by patriarchal capitalism over human bodies within Almanac, that – as the fate of the geologist exposes – are predicated upon the unsustainable. This lack of sustainability is built into

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the patriarchal capitalist system: as David Harvey has argued, the constant economic booms and crashes act to demonstrate the system’s undeniable ‘irrationality’ (2010: 215). And this point is crucial: as many of Almanac’s readers have discovered, it is easy to become bewildered and overwhelmed by the oppressive textual worlds, and this is due in large part to our inability to provide a rational explanation for the horrors within the text. However, Almanac’s exposure of the irrationality of its patriarchal capitalist systems acts to offer both the textual characters and its readers a valuable sense of hope in the suggestion that there are viable ‘alternatives’ to these damaging ways of living and relating. Almanac’s depiction of viable alternative narratives is evident in its suggestion that a different kind of world is available to those who can develop an awareness and understanding of the relatedness, reciprocity and – most significantly – the sustainability of a range of Indigenous worldviews that are illustrated throughout the text. Or, to use Reed’s terminology, those who can develop an ‘understanding of NatureCulture as one seamless semiotic-­material process’ (2009: 34). The workings of resistance in Almanac are, therefore, directed against the unsustainable narratives that are damaging to both human beings and the Earth. The last three chapters of this study will consider the workings of resistance in some detail, exploring how the driving force of ‘Revolucíon’ is inextricable from the requirement for sustainable thinking and an understanding of relatedness. Most importantly, ‘Revolucíon’ requires that Almanac’s characters, and arguably also its readers, meet our obligations, to each other and also to the Earth. As I argue in these next three chapters, Almanac foregrounds sustainable Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives as a means by which its characters and readers can see viable alternatives, and so develop and enact a sense of ‘grounded normativity’, where what is ‘normal’ and ‘normalized’ are sustainable relationships of all kinds. It is only via these sorts of sustainable alternative narratives that Almanac’s characters can hope for any escape from the kinds of profoundly dissociative and violently controlling cultures that saturate the text. And this, of course, has much wider extra-­textual implications: as Stacy Alaimo has argued in her important analysis of Bodily Natures, ‘environmental ethics, social theories, popular understandings of science, and conceptions of the human self ’ are profoundly altered by the recognition that ‘the environment is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves’ (2010: 4). Accordingly, these last three chapters will also consider the wide-­ranging role of hope in the text; and how hope is itself related to understandings of sustainability, to the ability to see beyond the textual (and extra-­textual) death-­worlds, and to the very possibility of ‘Revolucíon’. ‘Revolucíon’ is, in Silko’s text, directly connected both to profound social change, and to profound changes in human relationships with the natural world. It is, furthermore, directly connected to our ability to change the cultural narratives we tell of those relationships. For twenty-­first-century readers, who see extra-­textual popular understandings of the ‘fact’ and effects of

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climate change continually grow yet who also see those ‘facts’ continually challenged on a daily basis,2 a reading of the workings of ‘Revolucíon’ is particularly pertinent. The starting point for my discussion here is Almanac’s map, and its blunt ‘prophecy’ of ‘the disappearance of all things European’ (1991: map legend). This declaration understandably caused some consternation in the original critical reviews and was widely interpreted – notably by white, male scholars of European descent – as a clarion call for a physical decolonization of the United States. As I commented in the first chapter of this study, Almanac was deeply criticized by some reviewers for its prediction of the ‘downfall’ of white American society. However, these same critics were also provoked by a second map legend in the text, which contentiously declared that the tribes ‘seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands’ (1991). Coupled with the prediction of the ‘disappearance of all things European’, this provocative declaration was interpreted as arguing for the reclamation of American national land by Indigenous peoples; and as suggesting – via this ‘disappearance’ – the removal of all Americans of non-Indigenous descent from the United States. Given the complexity of Silko’s novel, this interpretation is deeply reductive; given the scale of the systemic ideologies that the text critiques, it is also highly simplistic. Ann Brigham has argued that ‘the story of taking back the land raises the question of what constitutes that land’, and that this question can only begin to be answered by a consideration of ‘the struggle[s] that the map inscribes’ (2004: 305, emphasis added). As Brigham has suggested, these inscribed struggles show that ‘land is both material and narrative’ (2004: 305, emphasis added). If this is the case, if land is directly related both to Indigenous history and to Indigenous stories, then a ‘return’ of that land is also a return to the cultural and spiritual values of Indigenous cosmopolitics, to a political vision that recognizes that cosmos and politics are indivisible. In this context, it is timely to revisit Coulthard’s formulation to remember that such cosmopolitical worldviews are ‘deeply informed’ by an understanding of ‘the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations’ that depend upon humans living in ‘nondominating and nonexploitative terms’ with one another and with the land (2014: 13, original emphasis). As Coulthard’s configuration suggests, the material struggle for the land that is central to Indigenous sovereignty is inseparable from the cosmopolitical narratives that inform this struggle. In this sense, Almanac’s demand for the return of tribal land is equally a demand for a return to established and sustainable Indigenous understandings of cooperation and community, and of the human and natural world as a holistic whole. And it is a return to an understanding that the survival of the human species depends on an ability to reject imposed, unnatural and unsustainable hierarchies in favour of more sustainable forms of living and inter-­relating. With the convergence of the interests of myriad cultural and ‘racial’ groups within Almanac’s pages, culminating in the rising up of the ‘Army of the Homeless’ (aka the ‘Army of Justice’) in the United States and the ‘Army of the Poor’ (aka

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the ‘Army of Justice and Redistribution’) in Mexico, it is clear that the ‘disappearance of all things European’ refers, at least in part, to an embracing of Indigenous cosmopolitics by divergent textual groups including those of European descent. As the Mayan character Angelita La Escapía comments, in the ecologically ravaged and damaged worlds of the text, it is now ‘up to the poorest tribal people and survivors of European genocide to show the remaining humans how all could share and live on the earth’ (1991: 749). In its consideration of ‘Revolucíon and relatedness’, this chapter will therefore focus on the ways in which Almanac presents its readers with viable sustainable alternative narratives as an important form of hope within a text that relentlessly depicts the loss and absence of hope. Hope is here inseparable from resistance; and this chapter will therefore consider a series of alternatives and alliances that offer both resistance and hope, all of which also contain the potential for ‘Revolucíon’ in its role as paradigm changer. This potential relates not only to the textual characters but also, by extension, to our own extra-­textual potential: to our ability to effect and enact a ‘change of paradigm’ in our own narrated worldviews, lifestyles and working practices. My starting point here is the argument that, while the theft of land is both material and physical, that same theft is also cosmopolitical: it is the theft of individual and collective rights, of freedoms and futures, and ultimately of hope itself. The first section of this chapter will, therefore, analyse the role played by the textual almanac as one of the alternative cosmopolitical narratives of the text, alongside an examination of the textual representations and Indigenous interpretations of Karl Marx, to assess the ways in which new ways of thinking and the telling of new and more inclusive stories offer challenges that both embody and transmit hope. The subsequent section will consider Almanac’s alternative ‘networks’: the ways in which the oppressive technologies explored in the last chapter can be hijacked, hacked and harnessed for the benefit of all rather than the few. This section will explore the manipulation of television signals by the old Yupik woman; the use of television as a form of dissemination by Lecha in her role as a ‘TV psychic’; and the possibilities of the computer technologies made clear by the Korean ‘hacktivist’ Awa Gee. This chapter will conclude with an exploration of environmental and ecological alliances, considering the potential for collaboration with the eco-­warrior group ‘Green Vengeance’. This final section will think through the ways in which the land – and our relationships to it – is representative of individual and collective freedoms and futures, and of hope.

Alter/Native cosmopolitical narratives Due to the power of patriarchal capitalist narratives, it is essential that any alternatives, any counter-­narratives that have the potential to challenge the dominant paradigm, are equally powerful. For a twenty-­first-century reading,

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this understanding of the power of a self-­naturalizing narrative is crucial as twenty-­first-century readers are in the very unusual position of having experienced highly visible public demonstrations of the workings of self-­ naturalizing narratives. Since 2016, our extra-­textual world has been subject to a strange new order which is extremely pertinent to an updated reading of Almanac, and particularly interesting because the proponents of this ‘new order’ have publicly narrated themselves as ‘alternatives’ to current socio-­political systems, in spite of the fact that they clearly (one might argue cynically) have remained true to the very systems they claim to be in the process of overturning. It is an extra-­textual context that has very real and disturbing resonances for revised and updated readings of Almanac, not simply in terms of how elites act to protect their status – this order is disguised as ‘new’ but is anything but new – but also in terms of how popular consent is narrated, manufactured and maintained, and how popular resistance is co-­opted and defused. In 2017, therefore, powerful and wealthy white men such as President Trump in the United States and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom have presented themselves – and, notably, have been widely publicly accepted – as ‘men of the people’, acting in the interests of the ‘common man’ in spite of, often in direct contradiction to, their own wealth and elite social status. Their powerful media attacks on established socio-­political ‘elites’ have attracted widespread popular support from the poorest, most powerless and most oppressed in each nation, in large part because those attacks have carefully distanced both men from ‘the establishment’, which can then be blamed for all social ills. What we can detect extra-­textually in 2017, then, is the in-­fighting of patriarchal capitalist elites. In the context of Almanac, this creation of a manufactured ‘alternative’ narrative is fascinating, in large part because neither extra-­textual example represents any kind of alternative: neither the US nor the UK is getting anything ‘new’; this is simply the established order re-­packaged and cynically re-­sold. Even more important, however, is the emphasis given by both Trump and Farage to their new forms of narrative: both present their new narratives as ‘alternative facts’; and both decry established narratives, and especially new narratives that offer a challenge to their power, as ‘fake’. This new emphasis upon a counter-­ narrative that bears no relationship to ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ is terrifying for many US and UK citizens, since these re-­visions of the national or historical narrative are validated whether or not they contain truth/fact, and any challenge that offers ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ can be simply dismissed as ‘fake’. Moreover, the most oppressed of both countries are so desperate for change that many have accepted both men as a challenge to established ways of doing things, regardless of the irrationality of either example. The irony of the very poorest in the nation ‘taking back control’ by handing that control back to wealthy elites is painful to witness, but aptly demonstrates the profound irrationality of these ‘new’ twenty-­ first-century social orders. The disturbing relationship of these extra-­textual examples to Almanac’s narrative lies primarily in a comparison of the ways that the textual patriarchal capitalist elites consolidate their positions and resist all

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challenges to their power: it is very difficult to offer an effective challenge to a power system that is profoundly irrational. Moreover, what is notable about both extra-­textual examples is that, while they insist they represent an alternative, they simply reiterate existing paradigms and so ultimately offer no hope, instead consolidating their position through the dependence caused by hopelessness. Both, therefore, shed important retrospective light on the workings of elite power in Silko’s novel. Almanac’s narratives of resistance offer a direct challenge to these kinds of power systems: in their presentation of alternatives, they clearly foreground hope as the primary outcome, as my subsequent readings here will demonstrate. My initial focus then is on the power of narratives, of stories; first in the Indigenous textual almanac, and then in Angelita’s indigenized readings of the writings of Marx. The significance of the textual almanac is immense because it is the titular focus of the novel: this physical text is the ‘Almanac of the Dead’ and it contains, represents and amplifies the silenced voices of the ‘sixty million dead souls that howl for justice in the Americas!’ (1991: 723).3 In this context, the textual almanac is crucial to an understanding of relatedness and reciprocity, including the relationships between the living and the dead. In direct contrast to the hegemonic narrative of capitalist patriarchy that is also textually present, the almanac acts as a vessel for multiple voices and often conflicting testimonies. The very physical presence of the almanac acts as a challenge to the dominant narrative: it is a written pre-­contact Indigenous text and so disrupts established white histories that imposed European value systems to equate civilization with written language and so justify colonization, settlement and acts of genocide in the Americas. Drawing directly upon surviving extra-­textual Mayan books, the textual almanac has stylistic divisions that are designed specifically to evoke the textual form of the Mayan codices, with self-­contained yet inter-­related units that represent Mayan understandings of time. The almanac thus provides a living record of living time, whose temporal segments can be identified by their essence, and which perpetually return and replay. Most significantly, the physical journey of the Indigenous almanac north to save it from European invaders exposes the manner by which time (the almanac) moves through space (the Americas). In this sense, the temporal is directly linked to both the historical and the geographical; and, as Yvonne Reineke has commented, it is in this manner that Silko illustrates ‘quite literally’ sophisticated Indigenous cosmological conceptualizations which show that ‘time is thus related to movement through space’ (1998: 74). Although based upon the Mayan codices, it is significant that this sacred Indigenous text is identified as an ‘almanac’: as Thomas F. Glick et al. have noted, the origins of the term ‘almanac’ are not entirely clear, but it is likely that it derives, at least in part, from the Spanish Arabic term ‘al-­manakh’, used to denote a ‘reckoning’ related to the ‘astronomical data’ of celestial bodies (2005: 29). The physical and material basis of the almanac thus fits perfectly with Almanac’s own cosmopolitics, its emphasis upon the inter-­relationships that link human and celestial bodies.

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Within the almanac’s cosmopolitical narratives, time is the primary creation, ‘[t]he Month was created first, before the World’ (1991: 570). It is time that therefore assumes the role of creator: ‘[s]o the Month was created, then the Day, as it was called, was created, and the rain’s stairway to Earth – the rocks and the trees – all creatures of the sea and land were created’ (1991: 571). Here, the physical almanac of the text deliberately challenges and overturns the powerful established hierarchies of Genesis; and time ‘creates’ specifically by moving through space: ‘Month . . . had to measure the whole World by walking it off day by day’ (1991: 571). The concept of Indigenous time that is presented is one of pre-­ordained epochs through which we live: the emphasis is firmly upon the insignificance of humanity’s impact upon time and space; upon history and geography. Moreover, there is a fundamental understanding of the relatedness of all these systems, which includes humans. It is a concept that is echoed in the almanac form, which parodies Christian calendars and their attempts to demarcate and control time, while simultaneously illustrating time’s limitless and uncontrollable motion and life-­force. As Virginia E. Bell has noted, the textual almanac is an example of both ‘counter-­chronicling’ and ‘alternative mapping’, of temporalized forms of historiography and geography/cartography (2000). And, in this sense, the textual almanac offers a direct challenge to the kinds of powerful academic discourse considered in the last chapter. Moreover, the textual almanac deliberately disrupts linear notions of time, actively unsettling notions of chronological time that Homi Bhabha has suggested ‘gives the imagined world of the nation a sociological solidity’ (1990: 308). By contrast, in the textual almanac ‘the days, years, and centuries are spirit beings who traveled the universe, returning endlessly’ and can be identified by their essential ‘characteristics’ (1991: 523). This concept of motion and interconnection is illustrated through the physical movement of the almanac itself, carried north by four Yaqui children who were among the ‘few survivors of the Butcher’, the Spanish conquistador Nuño de Guzman, infamous still for the brutality of his crimes against Indigenous peoples in the Americas (1991: 246). As Joni Adamson has argued, one of Silko’s interests in drawing upon Mayan codices is to think through the ways in which ‘the Maya struggled in the face of violence and loss to continue as a people’ (2001: 140–1). While the vital life of physical almanac clearly derives from its function as a record of living time, it is clear that it derives equally from its purpose as a vessel of identity for the community to whom it belongs. For the original Indigenous keepers, the almanac provides spiritual sustenance, carrying vital information on ‘who they were and where they had come from’, so that ‘if even part of their almanac survived, they as a people would return someday’ (1991: 246, emphasis added). As this final phrase suggests, Indigenous identity is here inextricably tied to cultural and spiritual values; and the survival of the almanac – of the story – even if only in part, is a survival of those very values. The almanac is therefore a vivid and vital assertion of Indigenous cosmovisions and cosmopolitics. Crucially, when the starving children resort to

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eating the horse-­gut pages of the almanac after memorizing its stories, it is clear that the almanac also provides more than physical sustenance: as the children savour the ‘wonderful flavour’ of their own cultural stories, ‘they all began to gain strength from just one potful of stew’ (1991: 250, 249). Here, the strength that is gained is also cultural and spiritual. And the living organic nature of the Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives contained by the almanac is evident in the written words that detach themselves from the page like ‘flocks of small birds’ to add ‘flavour’ to the stew (1991: 249). The pages of the almanac, therefore, ‘held many forces within them, countless physical and spiritual properties to make the people strong’ (1991: 252). Its role as a receptacle of Indigenous cosmopolitics and communal identity is evident in the naming of the stories – the ‘mouths’ and the ‘tongues’ – that comprise the almanac (1991: 142). Importantly, the almanac is itself an account of its keepers, and of a wide range of elided and silenced testimonies, written and unwritten: it is ‘splashed with wine’, and marked with ‘water or blood’, dotted with the ‘scribbles and scratches’ that are added to the margins by its marginalized keepers (1991: 569, 570). These continual changes and additions demonstrate Almanac’s emphasis on motion and interconnection, and readers can see this in the constant transformation of the Indigenous text. The textual almanac thus undertakes a linguistic transition to English, undergoes a physical transition from hand written artefact to word-­processed document, incorporates the inclusions of other texts, and welcomes the addition of the personal and communal histories of those who keep the almanac. These added stories include Yoeme’s tale of her miraculous escape from American ‘justice’ and execution; Seese’s insertion of her own dream about her lost son; and the story of the Yaqui children’s journey north that is also ‘somehow . . . included’ within the text as they carry it to safety (1991: 247). Almanac states quite categorically that a condition imposed upon the keepers is that ‘nothing must be added that is not already there’, and so these additions are truly thought-­provoking (1991: 129, emphasis added). As Daria Donnelly has noted, it is this inclusion within the text – both almanac and Almanac – of ‘unauthorized marginal storytellers’ that best illustrates Silko’s own ‘narrative commitment’ to the ‘inclusion of everyone’s testimony’ (1999: 249, 250). In piecing together a reading of these fragments, Almanac’s readers are thus required to foreground an Indigenous cosmos, where all times and events are merely repetitions of times and events that have already occurred, and which will occur again repeatedly. Almanac’s readers are challenged ultimately to reach an understanding that the content of the ‘time’ we find ourselves in can be managed if its dangers are properly perceived and recognized: as Almanac clearly tells us, ‘all anyone could do was recognize the . . . spirits of the days, and take precautions’ (1991: 251). In this sense, the physical textual almanac is, as Adamson has argued, a ‘seeing instrument’ which provides those readers willing to look and to see with a ‘complex navigation system’ (2001: 141). Importantly, this deployment of an Indigenous cosmos offers a challenge not only to individual reader perception, but also to the

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powerful narratives of the patriarchal capitalist state. As Donnelly has argued, in stark contrast to the actual physically surviving Mayan codices that sit ‘entombed’ in unopened and ‘immovable’ caskets for their own protection within the vaults of European libraries, the fragmented, amended, translated, and partially consumed physical almanac of the text – and the Indigenous cosmopolitics upon which Silko draws – nonetheless remain remarkably mobile and vitally alive (1999: 245). The textual almanac’s most significant role, however, is as ‘a living power . . . that would bring all the tribal people of the Americas together to retake the land’ (1991: 569). In the context of Almanac’s consideration of resistance and Revolucíon, it is crucial for readers to note that Lecha keeps the almanac in a ‘wooden ammunition box’, an act that exposes the almanac’s true nature as a powerful and effective cosmopolitical weapon (1991: 245). Yet, if we consider that Almanac’s commitment to ‘the disappearance of all things European’ can be read in terms of the disappearance of damaging patriarchal capitalist narratives, then the challenge that the almanac represents has the potential to be even more dangerous. The almanac itself is a receptacle not only for Indigenous stories and experiences, but also for the stories of other marginalized and oppressed non-Indigenous characters such as Seese. If we accept Almanac’s assertion that no story can appear that isn’t already there, then we also have to accept that Seese’s story somehow fits into the Indigenous cosmopolitical narrative that is being told. Some potential solutions to this seeming dilemma can be seen in the ways in which Almanac traces a series of networks and alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters; in the growing number of non-Indigenous textual characters who seem to be looking to Indigenous cosmopolitical worldviews for more sustainable ways of living and relating; and in the rising up of the textual ‘armies’, in particular the primarily non-Indigenous ‘Army of the Homeless’ which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 7. The threat of the almanac can be detected in its own constant internal movement, in its stories and narratives that adapt to suit the times they address because, as Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony comments, ‘things which don’t shift and grow are dead things’ (1986: 126). And this warning is aptly demonstrated by the death-­worlds of the text, whose death is the result of imposed and enforced inertia and stasis. In this context of shifting and growing, the almanac can be seen to practise exactly what it preaches, as it shows its textual keepers and Almanac’s readers how to adapt in recognition of the nature of the times and how to take precautions. Importantly, these precautions embody the revolutionary, and are deliberately aimed at changing dominant paradigms. And so we see that the original almanac entry, ‘[o]ne day a story will arrive at your town. . . . when you hear this story, you will know it is the signal for you and other to prepare’, re-­ writes itself over the course of the novel to address the increasingly oppressive and dangerous times in which the characters find themselves (1991: 135–6). In an act that asserts both the dynamism of Indigenous cosmopolitics and a

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recognition of the dangerous times in which the characters are living, the almanac add to its written instructions to demand that: ‘after you hear the story, you and the others prepare . . . to rise up against the slave masters’ (1991: 578, emphasis added). The danger of the Indigenous almanac is thus its sentience; it not only recognizes external social and political changes but actively adapts to address such changes, physically demonstrating the Indigenous understandings of time that it embodies. The almanac therefore has concrete and measurable effects on the world around it, since its narrative not only ensures that its stories will be re-­told, but that ‘with each retelling a slight but permanent shift took place’, so that ‘each time a revolutionary escaped death in one century, two revolutionaries escaped certain death in the following century’ (1991: 581). As a direct result Almanac’s readers are, crucially, encouraged to consider the textual almanac within the context of Indigenous cosmologies more widely; to compare the ossified and unsustainable patriarchal capitalist death-­worlds with the dynamic, renewing and sustainable Indigenous narratives evident in the textual almanac and elsewhere. Ultimately, as readers we are required to reflect on the suggestion that those individuals and cultures that refuse to ‘shift and grow’ – textually and extra-­textually – are in reality already ‘dead’. This emphasis upon dynamism, upon a desire and ability to shift and grow, and the challenges this offers to static, ossified and deadly worldviews, is equally evident in Almanac’s textual deployment of the figure of Karl Marx. Importantly, what Almanac’s readers get is not Marx the historical figure, or Marx’s ideas as interpreted via generations of Marxists thinkers, or as deployed by a range of state systems of varied success, but an indigenized narration: Marx the ‘tribal . . . storyteller’ as interpreted by the Mayan character Angelita La Escapía (1991: 520). Here, the text makes clear distinctions between Marx’s writings, the power of his stories, and what T. V. Reed identifies as the ‘bloodless, mechanical’ Marxism of the Cuban Bartolomeo that shows no ‘respect for the living or the dead’ (2009: 35). Angelita is therefore ‘contemptuous’ of the Cuban’s ‘ignorance of Marx’ and asserts her belief that many Marxists ‘disgraced his name’ (1991: 519). Taught by nuns in her convent school to view Marx as a ‘bogeyman’, and recognizing that the enemy of her enemy was a friend, Angelita ‘understood instinctively’ that Marx ‘had to be . . . [her] ally’ (1991: 519, original emphasis). While Angelita argues that Marx had ‘been inspired by reading about certain Native American communal societies’, she also recognizes that he had nevertheless ‘misunderstood a great deal’ (1991: 519). However, for Angelita, Marx had understood at a visceral level the relatedness of human beings and, while he had not fully understood the inter-­relatedness of humans and the natural world, he had understood that ‘the destruction of one [human] harmed all the others’ (1991: 520). The figure of Marx is deployed in the text as a means by which Angelita and other Indigenous characters can understand the violences of vampire capitalism: as Adamson has argued, Marx allows Angelita to ‘understand the philosophical and cultural roots of colonialism and environmental degradation’ in order to offer the best defense of her people

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‘from the effects of state- and corporate-­sponsored violence’ (2012: 4–5). For Angelita, the power of Marx lies in the truths contained within his stories that trace and decry the excesses of vampire capitalism, as she bluntly explains, she can judge the truth of Marx’s stories because ‘his accounts’ of atrocities and oppression were ‘consistent with what the people already knew’ (1991: 314, 312, emphasis added). Angelita’s interpretation is thus experiential, and one of the attractions of Marx for her is the way that his stories critique and damn European societies for the kinds of abuses that Angelita’s people have witnessed being enacted by those same societies of ‘vampires and monsters’ in the Americas since ‘first contact’ (1991: 312). Importantly, Angelita’s indigenization of Marx directly links the power of his writings with the kind of power embodied within the textual almanac, insisting that Marx’s understanding that ‘history would catch up with you’, that wrongdoers would be exposed by the ‘powerful spirits’ residing within ‘sacred’ stories or histories, that ‘the most complete history was the most powerful force’ demonstrated implicit links between his thinking and the sustainable values of Indigenous cosmopolitics (1991: 316). Moreover, in the context of Almanac’s profoundly unequal worlds that, like the nineteenth-­century worlds that Marx was describing, rely on the oppression and exploitation of the very poorest in society, these implicit links between Marx’s writing and Indigenous cosmopolitics seem to derive from Marx’s commitment – both narrative and political – to a more equal and just society. In Angelita’s Indigenous retelling of Marx’s stories, therefore, it is clear that what Marx is drawing attention to via the broken bodies of the expendable workers is the fundamental unsustainability of vampire capitalism. For Angelita, Marx’s calls for a more just society are thus inseparable from the call for more sustainable way of livings and interacting. Like the textual almanac, Marx’s ‘magical assembly of stories’ has the power to ‘cure the suffering and evils of the world by a retelling of th[os]e stories’ of injustice (1991: 316). Such retellings engage directly with the transformative power of the textual almanac, as Marx’s words of long-­ago suffering ‘transformed the present moment’ creating an emotive response in those listening and reading generations later, and promoting an realization in those new audiences that they ‘did not struggle alone’ (1991: 520). Like the textual almanac, the transformative and revolutionary power of Marx’s stories lies in their ability to provoke both reaction and action in others, to inspire others to challenge the deathly paradigms of patriarchal capitalism because the ‘immense energy’ of Marx’s words ‘aroused . . . fierce passion and a determination for justice’ (1991: 520). While Angelita is fully aware that Marx ‘hadn’t quite got it right’, she can see that he had nonetheless ‘been on the right track’ in his awareness that ‘the earth belongs to no one’ (1991: 749). Angelita’s ‘Marx’ is thus indigenized, his nineteenth-­century concerns for the relatedness of all oppressed workers are extended to engage with Indigenous cosmopolitics to emphasize the equivalent relatedness of humans and the natural world. Most importantly, Angelita’s indigenized ‘Marx’ demonstrates that resistance and Revolucíon are possible, if

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we understand that the violences enacted by patriarchal capitalism against our freedoms, futures and hope are identical to the violences enacted against the Earth. To successfully challenge the dominant paradigm, Almanac’s characters – and so also its readers – must come to the understanding that human freedom, justice and hope are inseparable from the freedom, justice and hope of the natural world.

Technological resistance Almanac gives us one means by which to avoid reductive readings of the ‘disappearance of all things European’ via its consideration of the role of technological resistance. The text is saturated with examples of the misuse and abuse of science and technology, from Serlo’s alternate wombs and earth units, through Leah’s demands for vast quantities of water in the desert, to Menardo’s blind faith in his bullet-­proof vest. These demonstrate the ways in which science and technology are truly damaging when they are deployed for the benefit of the few with no thought for the impact upon the many, or upon the non-­human or extra-­human world. From these examples, it would be easy to assume that Almanac is a profoundly anti-­technological text. However, Almanac also shows us the potential of technology: how it does not have to be solely related to individual or elite profit; how it can instead be harnessed for the benefit and good of all. Most importantly, Almanac shows how technology can be used as a powerful form of resistance, even Revolucíon. While the networks I have discussed in the first three chapters have been those exclusive to the powerful homosocial capitalist patriarchs, this section will consider a series of alternative ‘networks’ that draw upon the values evident both in Marx’s stories and in Indigenous cosmopolitics to offer freedom rather than oppression, and hope rather than despair. I will discuss more traditional forms of human networks in the final two chapters, but here the ‘networks’ under discussion are technological: the powerful connectivities of electricity, computer systems, the internet, and television and satellite signals and systems. In one sense, control of a network such as electricity is quite literally the control of one of humanity’s primary sources of ‘power’. These matrices underpin all areas of modern life, and control of them is, increasingly, the control of the means of production and communication. It is, to use the terminology of the era in which Almanac was published, to take and have control of the ‘information superhighway’. In this context, control of such technological networks is also the control of forms of representation: as Alex Hunt has argued, ‘[r]representation is powerful . . . in our age of “gadgets” ’ (2004: 261). Control of such technological networks is equally the control of the dissemination of narratives, of the kinds of stories that can be transmitted to vast and receptive audiences. It is, in short, the control of powerful means of mass communication through which those who resist can effect control and stop the dangerously damaging technological

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acts of capitalist patriarchy. And this wrenching of control of technology from powerful patriarchal capitalist elites is crucial because, as Hunt has commented, ‘[a]ll of the technology that enables television, satellite imaging, and scientific meteorology is itself a meager attempt at mastery of the world through its representation’; it is an extension of the rigidly defined scientific controls of the Cartesian worldview into the fields of visual and virtual representation (2004: 261). The potential in harnessing these technologies for the purpose of Revolucíon, for the dissemination of a viable alternative narrative to vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy, is therefore immense. In this sense, those who disrupt technology in Almanac are quite clearly ‘hacktivists’ who deliberately access power networks for political and/or cosmopolitical ends. This is evident in the actions of the old Yupik woman that Lecha meets in Alaska, who ‘had realized the possibilities in the white man’s gadgets’ (1991: 155). In an episode entitled ‘Eskimo TV’, the old Yupik woman disrupts and overturns ‘unnatural’ scientific concepts of mastery to take control of the satellite television signals and harness what the text identifies as ‘[n]atural electricity. Fields of forces’ (1991: 155–6). The old woman’s ‘system’, which has taken her ‘months to perfect’, is shown to be clearly drawn from what is presented in the text as traditional Indigenous practices. Remembering the old medicine people who had long used the natural energy of quartz crystals as ‘tiny television sets’, the old woman takes control of the local satellite network to ‘gathe[r] great surges of energy out of the atmosphere’ (1991: 156). While the woman ‘summo[ns] [Indigenous] spirit beings through recitations of the stories’, those same Indigenous stories are ‘indictments of the greedy destroyers of the land’ (1991: 156). Through the ‘spirits of the ancestors’, the old woman is thus able to ‘assemble powerful forces’ with which she can not only resist the forces of patriarchal capitalism, but also turn back upon it the technologies on which patriarchal capitalism has become so dependent. The old woman’s manipulation of the energy flows of satellite technology demonstrates an important juxtaposition of natural with unnatural, as her ‘plane-­crashing spell’ is effected through the meeting of the material with the virtual, caused by the static electricity of weasel fur rubbed on the satellite TV screen. Utilizing the power of story – significantly, the story of Eskimo Rose’s brothers and sisters, who were burned to death as a direct result of the combined forces of colonialism and poverty – the old woman summons ‘all the force of the spirit beings furious and vengeful’ in a demand for justice (1991: 157). Here, we can read both the actions and the motivations of the old woman in the context of Angelita’s indigenized Marx, where a story of injustice is deployed as a demand for justice. The Indigenous narrative that is uncovered is Rose’s, and her continued trauma and suffering, not only because her siblings died because her parents were preyed upon by the local bootlegger, but also because she suffers overwhelming guilt because she wasn’t there to care for them, or allowed to return from state boarding school to bury them. The justice that is demanded, then, is for those dead children, for Rose who is still haunted

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by the siblings she could not save, and for the wider Yupik community who are all deeply affected by each and every story of this kind. In this context, the story told is emblematic of the kinds of intergenerational inherited trauma that, as I discussed in the last chapter, has profound physical effects for subsequent generations. Significantly, given the context of Marx, Almanac also demonstrates how this story of injustice is deployed to provoke action: the old woman’s spell is successful, and Lecha watches the visual image of a far-­off plane crashing on the TV screen that acts as a conduit for a more ‘natural’ form of electricity. It is only later that Lecha discovers that this plane was carefully chosen to represent the dominant and dominating narratives of patriarchal capitalism: the plane was carrying a ‘geologist, and a quarter-­million-dollar-­sensor unit’ as part of a concerted capitalist drive by ‘the energy exploration companies’ to exploit the natural resources – the ‘oil, gas, uranium, and gold’ – that are hidden in the otherwise valueless ‘frozen wastes’ of Alaska (1991: 159). As Laura Shackelford has noted, the old woman’s success derives from her recognition that ‘technologies of abstraction are not immaterial’ and her realization of the ‘possibilities in their materiality unrealized by these instrumental capitalist flows’ (2006). From the map of an insurance adjustor, Lecha discovers that there have been ‘dozens of [identical] unexplained plane crashes’ (1991: 160). Here, there is an extension of the justice already demanded, and it is clear that an identical form of justice is demanded for the land itself. In this context, Almanac makes an important point about inter-­relatedness, showing how the experiences of a single Yupik family are also those of their tribal group; how, by extension, the experiences of that Indigenous group are directly related to the experiences of other colonized Indigenous groups in the Americas; how, if we extend the experience of colonization still further to include contemporary forms of technological enterprise, those Indigenous experiences are related to the experiences of the Earth itself. The stories and actions of the old Yupik woman uncover and emphasize this chain of inter-­relatedness, and so offer a direct challenge to the ‘whiteout’ of patriarchal capitalist narratives and their dissemination of a dangerous blindness about an inter-­related and holistic world (1991: 160). As Hunt has argued, the old ‘Yupik woman’s magic eclipses and appropriates . . . technology within the far more powerful capability of Indigenous stories’ (2004: 261). Even more significantly, the successful wresting of control of the means of communication, of power, from elite patriarchal capitalist groups offers not simply resistance, but the potential for true Revolucíon. Unlike patriarchal capitalism, the old Yupik woman’s actions suggest, as Shackleford has argued, that ‘satellite transmissions, as material flows, cannot be controlled, cancelled, or reduced to . . . a means to an end’ (2006). Eskimo TV is, therefore, a form of ‘epistemological, electromagnetic resistance’ that is potentially paradigm-­changing (Shackleford 2006). This emphasis upon the power of television in terms of flow, control and dissemination is equally evident in Lecha’s role as a TV talk show psychic, and

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as an advisor to police departments on the location of missing bodies. Lecha’s special ‘gift’ is her ability to find what is lost, but more specifically her ability locates the dead, finds ‘the souls who do not rest because their remains are lost’ (1991: 138). While Lecha’s abilities seem highly specific, her abilities are nonetheless also directly related to a drive for justice: she is a ‘special contact’ for those who have been robbed of their lives, by murder or by suicide (1991: 138). Here, the linking of murder with suicide is most interesting, especially if we think back to the examples of Eric and David, and the ways in which both were deliberately driven to take their own lives, one consciously and the other unconsciously, by the textual forces of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy. For Lecha, therefore, suicide is a form of murder because the individual taking their own life has been driven to do so by the extremity of the conditions in which s/he lives. Lecha’s ability derives from her understanding of the ways in which the physical almanac allows its readers to predict and to read the nature of the times in which they live. While this is clearly necessary, Lecha is well aware that it is also dangerous: her ability to locate the dead coupled with her ethnicity means that she is likely at some point to be ‘connected’ or even charged ‘with the crime she’d just helped to solve’ (1991: 165). And there is of course added danger in the physical effects that locating the dead have upon Lecha’s own body, as she suffers from such overwhelming headaches that she has to pretend she has cancer in order to get strong enough pain relief. Finding the dead is ‘the cause of her pain’ because Lecha comes into direct contact not only with the powerful systemic ideologies whose ‘death of love’ facilitate these actions, but also with the individual desires that drive the ‘love of death’ for the textual characters who commit such atrocities (1991: 161). While Lecha clearly harnesses similar powers to the old Yupik woman, tapping into the flows of the almanac’s own temporal ‘natural forces’, her ability reiterates a key message of the text, evident in Angelita’s reading of Marx: the distribution of justice. In this sense, Lecha acts to trace, uncover and give justice to the dead. Since the systemic forces of ‘justice’ in the text – Judge Arne, the Tucson police force – are shown to be anything but impartial or ‘blind’, the primary beneficiaries of systemic justice are the wealthy elite textual individuals and groups. Lecha’s acts are, then, a politicized usurpation of the forces of justice within the text. Echoing the naming of the Army of Justice and Redistribution, this is a ‘redistribution’ of justice in favour of the oppressed majority. And Lecha’s encounter with the old Yupik woman allows her to see clearly how what she does in the present is intimately connected both to ancient Indigenous traditions that have been preserved, and to contemporary Indigenous cosmopolitics. Lecha’s work is also connected, more widely, to the kinds of justice that are demanded by the ‘mouths’ and ‘tongues’ of the textual almanac. Valerie Karno has argued that the bodies that Lecha traces are bodies that the law ‘cannot keep within its dominion’, that American law-­makers are, as a result, ‘[u]tterly incapable of finding’ (2001: 40). While this is clearly true, I would go further to argue that the law – as a part of the system that enables and facilitates the kinds of violent and abusive deaths

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with which Almanac is saturated – is itself complicit in this process. Crucially, it is the law that fails to punish the overwhelming crimes we see in the text. Karno has commented that Lecha ‘holds a privileged position in that she can detect the remnants of disorder far better than the structures of the law can’; importantly, those remnants of disorder can only be understood through the lens and narrative cosmopolitics of the textual almanac of the dead (2001: 40). While it is clear that Lecha’s popularity as a daytime TV ‘star’ is due to her audience’s fascination with (their love of) death, it is equally notable that Lecha’s appearances on the television network ‘disrupt’ just as actively as the weasel fur static created by the old Yupik woman. Although Lecha refuses to disclose exactly how she is able to locate dead bodies, her TV appearances nonetheless clearly demonstrate that her ability derives from an understanding that there are other ways of seeing the world. While the old Yupik woman manipulates the flows of electrical and satellite power, Lecha manipulates the power of television to disseminate information, including the kinds of alternate cosmopolitical narratives embodied within the textual almanac. One important message that Lecha’s visions expose and that Almanac’s readers are required to bear witness to is the text’s consideration of our current relationships with the natural world via the figure of the San Diego serial killer that Heather Houser has dubbed the ‘gardening killer’ (2014: 184). Almanac’s readers are here visual witnesses to Lecha’s vision of the actions of the serial killer who buries the bodies of the nineteen boys he has killed in the sand dunes, and periodically ‘uncovers’ them to tend to their ‘transformation’, as he ‘plants carefully and prays for tall trees’ (1991: 140–1). And yet, because this act is one of abuse and not care, Almanac makes it clear that these bodies will not grow and thrive: the killer thus ‘crush[es]’ their bodies as he ‘fondles’ them; even as he imagines those decomposing bodies as ‘moist with sap’, it is clear that they are too ‘fragile’ and ‘tender’ to survive his ‘gardening techniques’ (1991: 141). In this story, Almanac’s readers are required to see several crucially important points. First, we are required to see the ways in which our relationships to the natural world are essentially and fundamentally exploitative, how the sense of obligation and reciprocity that should undergird the human–nature relationship is eclipsed by a very different form of ‘care’, whose abusiveness is naturalized – made natural – through the innocuous and ‘domesticated’ form of ‘gardening’. Indeed, Houser has argued, this is a form of care that is created specifically to ‘obscur[e] . . . acts of violation and murder’ (2014: 184). Usurping and supplanting more mutually beneficial and balanced forms of human–nature relationships, this example is rather a form of what Houser has called ‘perverse pastoralism’ (2014: 184). Thus, while it persistently emphasizes the ‘growth’ of the dead bodies, it nonetheless ultimately demonstrates its unsustainability not only via the ‘scarcity’ yet volume of the ‘raw materials’ required, but also through the misplaced location of the bodies in sand dunes that ‘cannot sustain’ them (Houser 2014: 184). This is not, Houser has commented, a ‘check on cruelty and exploitation but . . . [rather] a vehicle for them’, and this is a vital point for Almanac’s readers, as we

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are led to a more developed understanding of how to see and to read healthy and non-­exploitative relationships with the land (2014: 184). The second crucially important point that readers are required to see are the inter-­relationships between human bodies and the land that are intimately and graphically portrayed in the decomposing bodies absorbed back into the land that surrounds them. This example, then, very visibly demonstrates Alaimo’s argument that, by refusing the dissections of a Cartesian worldview and instead ‘[i]magining human corporeality as trans-­corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-­than-human world’, we can thus clearly see ‘the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment” . . . since “nature” is always as close as one’s own skin– perhaps even closer’ (2010: 2). Alaimo’s suggestion is that ‘trans-­corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures’; and even more pertinent to this specific textual example is her argument that ‘thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions’ (2010: 2). This, significantly, offer a sense of hope in the text, which is echoed by Lecha’s own role as a locater of the dead. Although Lecha can only locate the dead body and not prevent the death itself, her actions nonetheless offer hope in an increasingly hopeless world; a sense that mindless acts might be able to be understood, or at the very least come to terms with, if we could only read their contexts better. If we could, as the textual almanac asserts, recognize that ‘[a]n experience termed past may actually return’, that while ‘[d]etails may vary, the essence doesn’t change’, then one form of hope that is offered is that these kinds of vicious and abusive acts might be preventable if we chose to exist and think outside of the violently controlling systems that facilitate such forms of brutality (1991: 574 original emphasis). In this context, Lecha’s TV appearances serve to disseminate not only an awareness that a different reading of the world is possible, but that the dead remain intimately related to the living and profoundly present; that the human body – whether alive or dead – is inseparable from the natural world. Lecha’s role thus offers ways in which we can read and understand not only the past but also the present and the future. Most importantly, Lecha demonstrates that these ‘connected’ dead are ‘immune’ to Almanac’s brutal patriarchal capitalist elites, and so have much to teach us about both relatedness and Revolucíon (1991: 581). In contrast to the old Yupik woman and Lecha, the Korean technology ‘genius’ Awa Gee chooses to manipulate computer networks and telephone technologies in his role as a ‘hacktivist’. He is, as Bridget O’Meara has argued, a ‘technorevolutionary’ (2000: 70). In some ways, Awa Gee is presented as an antidote to the kinds of blind faith shown by Menardo in the seemingly ‘unassailable’ technological advances of patriarchal capitalism. Instead, Almanac’s readers are shown Awa Gee’s ability to harness the power of computer and telephone technologies – the ‘enemy lightening’ of electrical networks – in

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order to turn it back on its ‘creators’ (1991: 678). In this context, Awa Gee is, as Alex Hunt has commented, an example of the ‘undoing . . . [of technological] dominance’ (2004: 267). Dismissed by the University of Arizona from his post developing a secret federal ‘space-­laser project’ when he is caught working on a prohibited related project of his own ‘after hours’, Awa Gee develops a ‘solar war machine’ from lenses stolen from the university (1991: 684). Importantly, Awa Gee emphasizes at every turn that his work is for the many rather than simply for the few: the solar war machine is bicycle-­mounted so that it can be easily and cheaply transported as ‘a weapon for the poor masses’ (1991: 684). Even more importantly, the solar-­powered weapon is itself a form of alternative energy, and in this way Almanac provides, as Hunt has commented, ‘an ironic commentary on “clean” technology put to . . . revolutionary purposes’ (2004: 267). In his chosen role as a provider for the masses, one of Awa Gee’s ‘specialties’ is the provision of ‘new identities, complete with passports, driver’s licenses, social security numbers’ for those trying to escape Almanac’s restrictive systemic narratives. Importantly, these new identities emerge from Awa Gee’s ‘redirection’ of the identities of the dead, and so Awa Gee’s role in the text is crucial in terms of understanding, apprehending, redirecting and even disseminating the ‘flows’ of narrative, capital and power. Awa Gee’s own understanding of the ways in which oppression is manufactured, how the oppressed are kept firmly in their place by the elites, is evident in the jobs he chooses to take. Working for Zeta, he tracks Max Blue’s telephone calls so that the interactions of vampire capitalism – meetings between Max and a variety of legal, military and government (US and Mexican) representatives – can be clearly seen. And Awa Gee is an expert in redirecting the electronic flow of capital because he recognizes that ‘international banking and finance were all part of a great flowing river where immense quantities might disappear before the river level fell noticeably’ (1991: 679). Claiming that ‘only rank amateurs . . . had ever been detected’ and that ‘the biggest heists . . . would not be detected for years’, Awa Gee ‘redirects’ the profits of vampire capitalism into ‘off-­shore bank accounts’ (1991: 679, 680). While this ‘redistribution’ is more often than not driven by the ‘revenge’ demanded by former employees, it is notable that Awa Gee himself is always ‘careful not to get greedy’ as this is a mark of the systems he opposes (1991: 680). Awa Gee, therefore, has ‘no interest in personal power’, rather his aim is for the systemic powers of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy to ‘wake up to discover how the numbers had suddenly added up to zero for them’ while ensuring that ‘[t]he power of the numbers would reside with the poor and the dispossessed’ (1991: 683). Importantly, Almanac’s readers are shown how Awa Gee’s status as an Asian immigrant to the United States has more significance for the textual forces of patriarchal capitalism than his obvious technological abilities. We see that Awa Gee goes from a prestigious job at Stanford to eventually working in a photo-­ lab. He also makes unpaid contributions to an international technological research project that he ‘funds’ with ‘junk’ from the university computer science

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centre ‘dumpster’ while, by contrast, his salaried academic colleagues in the project ‘receive millions in research grants’ (1991: 681). The danger that Gee himself poses is evident in the fact that the government ‘seized all of Awa Gee’s project notes’ and ‘prohibited’ him from ‘any further work with codes’ (1991: 682). As Awa Gee rightly comments, this is ‘injustice’ writ large, and his personal project, a redistribution of electrical energy, is quite clearly presented one of the text’s drives for justice. Awa Gee’s manipulation of electricity, of enemy lightening, is central to his demand for justice, and this includes a demand for justice for the Earth which, ‘torn open’ and ‘empty’, would have a chance ‘to heal and to rest . . . after the lights [of technology and rampant vampire capitalism] were turned out’ (1991: 683). Awa Gee’s war against these far-­reaching powers relies on his understanding that the greatest ‘vulnerability’ of the system is ‘the giant’s massive dependency on electrical power’; this ‘huge tactical error’ means not only that the power sources are ‘unguarded in remote locations’ but that the ‘first strike’ of any successful Revolucíon ‘must be made against electrical power sources’ (1991: 686). Indeed, the success of the strike relies on the ‘arrogance’ of the system which, much as I discussed in Chapter 2 in the context of Leah Blue, is based on the ‘assumption’ that ‘everything would be all right’ even if experts such as Awa Gee had detonated the computer ‘equivalent of a hydrogen bomb’ (1991: 688). What is important here to Awa Gee is that the giants can be brought down and justice attained by the concerted efforts of ‘small groups’ with ‘no leaders or chains of command’ (1991: 686). Much like the textual almanac itself, Awa Gee predicts that ‘[w]hen the time came, the people would sense it’ and ‘seize whatever was at hand’ and ‘bring down the giants’ (1991: 688). Like the textual almanac, Awa Gee’s narration of Revolucíon is not only inclusive, but profoundly non-­hierarchical.

Ecological resistance One of Awa Gee’s most interesting collaborations is with the extreme and extremist environmental activist group, Green Vengeance, and it is through Green Vengeance that Almanac provides a complex exploration of the very notion of ‘ecological resistance’. ‘Ecology’ is by its very definition the ‘totality of relations between organisms and their environment’, the ‘intricate system or complex’ in which all living things co-­exist. Drawing on the kinds of technological resistances that I have already discussed here, the notion of ecological resistance should, by extension, be a consideration of the ways in which the natural world in its entirety can resist the damage directed at it. And yet it is significant that when we think of narratives of ecological resistance, certainly in terms of the environmental movement, we are most often thinking solely in terms of human resistance. This is one of the key tensions in Almanac’s discussion of ecological resistance, most evident in the juxtaposition and collision of the values of an activist group such Green Vengeance with the

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cosmologies and cosmopolitics of the wide range of Indigenous textual characters. Green Vengeance are identified soon after their first appearance as a group that practice ‘deep ecology’ (1991: 689). This is a crucial distinction, as this points directly to the extra-­textual deep ecology movement, its recognition that all life forms are inter-­related, and its commitment to the view that, as David R. Keller has noted, ‘environmental philosophy must recognize the values that inhere objectively in nature independently of human wants, needs or desires’ (2008: 206). Coined by Arne Næss in 1973, the term ‘deep ecology’ thus points to what Næss himself identified as ‘not a slight reform . . . but a substantial reorientation of our whole civilization’, and the movement has subsequently called for ‘nothing less than the redirection of human history’ (Keller 2008: 206). It is, therefore, unsurprising that deep ecologists are included in a text that is so committed to paradigmatic Revolucíon. Yet their inclusion nonetheless emphasizes and exposes the tensions that have existed and still remain between the values and narratives of the environmental movement and the values and narratives of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, in the ironic ‘motto’ ‘Back to the Pleistocene’ that the textual deep ecologists adopt, and in the names chosen by individual characters such as ‘Earth Avenger’, ‘Eco-Coyote’ and ‘Eco-Grizzly’, we can trace the concerns voiced by a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters within the text: that such deep ecology groups simply represent another rigid belief system that refuses to ‘shift and grow’, that their demand to ‘return to cave living with the bears as their European forefathers had once lived’ fails to represent a viable form of contemporary cosmopolitical narrative (1991: 689). In this context, Almanac’s readers are left with the suspicion that this non-­shifting and non-­living worldview is representative of yet another textual ‘death-­world’; and it is notable that there has been robust criticism of the extra-­textual deep ecology movement for just these reasons, with Keller summarizing that the very ‘ahistoricity’ of the deep ecologists’ perspective ‘prevents them from seeing the real cultural causes of environmental problems’ (2008: 209, emphasis added). One key criticism of deep ecology has been its inability to link together cosmos and politics. In this context, it is notable that the ‘black Indian’ Clinton views such groups with extreme distrust, stating that ‘[s]omething about their choice of words’ made him ‘uneasy’, in large part because he ‘could read between the lines’ and anticipate that, for deep ecologists, ‘pollution’ often simply meant ‘overpopulation’, from which it was a very short step to ‘[s]top immigration!’ and ‘close the borders!’ (1991: 415). Here, again, we see the potentially problematic and dangerous links between fixed and rigid worldviews, especially if deep ecology groups, textual or extra-­textual, fail to recognize or address the cultural causes of environmental problems and so the intersections of cosmos and politics. As O’Meara has noted, ‘[a]n environmental movement that does not consistently and consciously foreground the relationship between the degradation of ecosystems and the violence against labor within gendered, racialized, and sexualized discourses and practices of capitalism merely serves and strengthens capital’s interests’ (2000: 71).

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This is clearly problematic, yet Green Vengeance are interesting in large part because they embody the kinds of tensions that Almanac attempts to negotiate and for which it has been critiqued over the years: between ‘tribalism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’, between nationalism or internationalism, between violence or peaceful resistance, between forms of collaboration. Most crucially, Green Vengeance embodies the very real extra-­textual benefits of the environmental movement – a popular awareness of ecological concerns – with its equally real dangers – the tendency to essentialize in reductive ways, especially in relation to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cosmologies and cosmopolitics. Above all, the tension that Green Vengeance represents is in the suggestion that, rather than challenging existing patriarchal capitalist paradigms, it simply replicates them. This can be traced in Zeta’s concern that the group are simply acting to give their murdered leader ‘glory’, and that this focus serves to amplify established hierarchies, including the positioning of human above the non-­human or extra-­human (1991: 729). Green Vengeance’s pivotal moment in the text is their appearance at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention, the point of convergence for all of the revolutionary forces of the text. Here, they screen a video showing that their new tactic is to recruit ‘the terminal and dying, the suicides, and the eco-­true believers who were fed up, who saw the approach of the end of nature and who wanted to do some good on their way out’ and transform those new recruits into ‘EcoKamikaze[s]’ via suicide bombings (1991: 690). The very notion of ‘environmental justice’ seems to come under question here as, in its single-­minded focus on justice for the Earth, Green Vengeance fails to recognize of the injustices suffered by those activists they have recruited, and so reiterates the separation of human and non-­human. Even more problematically, and directly countering some of the Indigenous cosmopolitics that are advocated throughout the text, this myopic focus fails to recognize the role of the Earth itself in both meting out and achieving justice, thus reiterating the narrative of a passive land. This paradox is evident in the figure of the ‘eco-­kamikaze’, which is presented by Green Vengeance as an extreme form of ‘direct action’. The figure of the eco-­kamikaze is significant given the violent forms of control we have already seen directed against just such marginalized and oppressed groups by Almanac’s elite patriarchal capitalist groups. Thinking back to Serlo’s funding of designer viruses, it is therefore highly pertinent that Green Vengeance’s video of their suicide bombing of the Glen Canyon Dam features a ‘gay rights activist ill with AIDS’ whose final message begs others to ‘[a]venge gay genocide by the U.S. government’ (1991: 730–1). However, the eco-­kamikaze actions seem to paradoxically reinscribe the violent forms of bodily control enforced by vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy in the text. In this manner, the role of the eco-­kamikaze acts to question and problematize the challenge that Green Vengeance’s narrative offers to established systems. As these examples demonstrate, there are multiple problems with the group but, in spite of these sometimes profound or troubling tensions, it nevertheless becomes clear from the accretive layers of inter-­relationships between the textual characters that there are also some very real connections and shared

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interests. Green Vengeance’s presence at the Convention suggests this, as does the Barefoot Hopi’s welcoming of them to the stage and his inclusion of them in his wider vision of resistance and Revolucíon. While the Barefoot Hope is a key figure in organizing resistance, as I will discuss in detail in the next chapter, he is also a pivotal figure in making the kinds of cross-­cultural connections that are necessary for the effective paradigmatic Revolucíon that Almanac seems to be advocating. The Barefoot Hopi therefore makes a tactical public ‘alliance’ with Green Vengeance, and Zeta notes her highly pragmatic ‘agreement with the tactic’, since Green Vengeance ‘had a great deal of wealth’ that would make them ‘useful allies’ (1991: 726). Green Vengeance are, as Sarah Jaquette Ray has argued, ‘useful in instrumental terms’ (2013: 11); and this can be seen in Awa Gee’s tactical decision to give his invisible help to their project to ‘turn out the lights’ because he recognizes that they share his desire, if not necessarily his motives, for a national electricity blackout (1991: 730). It is, tellingly, at this very moment when shared goals are recognized that Awa Gee stops using the term ‘eco-­terrorist’ and switches instead to ‘eco-­warrior’. Green Vengeance’s greatest impact comes from the video that they screen at the Convention, which graphically depicts the violent destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam and of the lives and bodies of the eco-­terrorists/eco-­warriors. Here, Silko clearly replicates the extra-­textual actions of ‘radical’ environmental activism groups such as Earth First!, who, in 1981, while Silko was writing Almanac, pretended to destroy the dam by hanging a plastic ‘crack’ on the dam’s wall. Inspired themselves by Ed Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang in which fictional activists destroy the dam, Earth First! not only filmed their ‘attack’ but also included a rare interview with Abbey.4 In this context, Green Vengeance’s video is clearly related and relatable to the kinds of technological resistance I have already discussed. Moreover, the video, and the textual audiences’ varied reactions to it, also seem to embody all of the tensions I have mentioned. Indeed, Green Vengeance’s blunt assertion that ‘This is war! We are not afraid to die to save the earth!’ evokes both unease and a grudging respect from the Indigenous and non-Indigenous audience (1991: 728). From the phrasing that Green Vengeance uses here, the unspoken implication is, of course, that the others are afraid, that the others do not care as much, that Green Vengeance’s own violent actions speak louder than words. This is clearly problematic, as these are sentiments that act to impose and assert further hierarchies. Nonetheless, both the video and the concluding statement are arresting: as Lecha comments drily and cynically to Zeta, this is a ‘[h]ard act to follow’ (1991: 728). And, of course, Lecha’s comment is highly accurate because, however sincere Green Vengeance’s ecological aspirations are, the very nature of its ‘performance’ acts first and foremost to narrate the eco-­warriors themselves, the human as opposed to the non-­human. In this context, Green Vengeance clearly depicts extra-­textual understandings of the limits of the deep ecology movement; which, as Keller has commented, ‘is less a finished product than a continuing, impassioned plea’ (2008: 210). It is the ‘impassioned’ nature of Green Vengeance’s ‘plea’ and its

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demand for immediate results that Lecha recognizes as the ‘hard act to follow’, and this is especially true for the textual Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives that tend more towards less performative and more long-­term strategies. If as, O’Meara has noted, ‘the persistent tensions between . . . [these] movements . . . may be the greatest asset of both’ (2000: 72), then one solution here seems to be the kind of tactical and temporary alliance that the Barefoot Hopi advocates. Green Vengeance and the tensions surrounding them thus embody Almanac’s textual hope that new alliances ‘will thrive not in spite of but because of the diversity of their constituents’ (O’Meara 2000: 72). This seems a particularly important part of Almanac’s message of hope, and exemplifies the textual understandings of inter-­relationship: that our individual and collective freedoms and futures are directly related and relatable. As Reed has commented, while the widely varied textual groups who advocate a paradigmatic Revolucíon ‘will not embrace exactly the same story [or] the same ideology’, it is notable that ‘each will see part of the truth’ (2009: 36, emphasis added). Much like the physical almanac itself, it becomes clear that the varied textual forces of resistance are themselves fragmentary narratives, requiring an assembling or reassembling for the full picture to be seen, and for potential freedoms, futures and hopes to be successfully read or interpreted. And this concept seems to be embodied in Green Vengeance’s videotape where, as Katrine Barber has noted, ‘the metaphysical and the physical are locked in a loop of technology that can be repeated over and over again’ but whose reception is confused (1996: 140). This assembling of the fragmented in order for their successful reading is perhaps especially true of the Indigenous cosmopolitics of the text, in part because Silko’s readership is less familiar with some of these concepts. Accordingly, the next chapter will focus on what Almanac identifies as the ‘Indian Connection’ to consider how, simply by offering viable paradigmatic alternatives to the damages caused by ‘all things European’, key examples of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives challenge the violent controls of the established patriarchal capitalist elites. The next chapter will therefore consider the ways in which three specific textual characters – the re-­imagined historical figure of Geronimo, the ‘poet-­lawyer’ Wilson Weasel Tail, and the prison-­ reforming Barefoot Hopi – tell stories that are, in the tradition of Angelita’s ‘Marx’, not only emancipatory, but enable their textual listeners and extra-­ textual readers to see ‘part’ of a bigger truth.

Notes 1 T. V. Reed (2009), 34, original emphasis. 2 See, for instance, Oliver Milman, ‘Donald Trump Picks Climate Change Sceptic Scott Pruitt to Lead EPA’ (The Guardian, 8 December 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/us-­news/2016/dec/07/trump-­scott-pruitt-­environmentalprotection-­agency).

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3 For an excellent early analysis of Silko’s use of the almanac form, see Joni Adamson, American Indian Literatures, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 4 See, for instance, Katrine E. Barber, ‘Wisecracking the Glen Canyon Dam: Revisioning Environmentalist Mythology’, in Change in the American West: Exploring the Human Dimension, ed. Stephen Tchudi (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1996), 127–43.

Chapter 6 F i f th W orld R ising : T he ‘I ndian C onnection ’

Rooted in the cosmovisión (or worldview) of the Quechua peoples of the Andes, sumak kawsay . . . describes a way of doing things that is community-­centric, ecologically-­balanced and culturally-­sensitive.1 As the epigraph above suggests, new forms of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives such as Quechua sumak kawsay – which translates very loosely as the ‘good way of living’ – are emerging in the twenty-­first century that are having a profound international impact. This is not least because their foundational conceptualization – of a world that is ‘community-­centric’, ‘ecologically balanced’ and ‘culturally sensitive’ – is resonating with growing popular international concerns over the human and ecological damages caused by current dominant cultural narratives. In large part, this growing international interest in new forms of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives derives from the fact that they provide a new way of seeing and relating to the world, and so offer appealing and viable alternatives to the restrictive narratives of patriarchal capitalism. These newly visible Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are, Oliver Balch has suggested, a ‘far cry from the market-­is-king model of capitalism’ (2013). Most significantly, Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives have impacted upon national law and law making, providing an ‘inspir[ation]’ for ‘the recently revised [2008] Ecuadorian constitution, which now reads: “We . . . hereby decide to build a new form of public coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living” ’ (Balch 2013). While the translation of sumak kawsay into either Spanish or English evokes uncomfortable and ill-­fitting popular nonIndigenous connotations of what Balch has identified as ‘wellbeing’ and ‘welfare’, these translated terms are importantly ‘not equivalents at all’ (2013). Rather, the relatedness embedded within both the term and the practice of sumak kawsay emphasizes, as the scholar Eduardo Gudynas has argued, that ‘the subject of wellbeing is not [about the] individual, but [about] the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation’ (Balch 2013, emphasis added). These new forms of Indigenous cosmopolitical

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narratives are, therefore, dynamic, and this point is vital: it is the very dynamism of these narratives, most evident in their role as inspiration for national and international legislation, that has been a fundamental factor in their growing international appeal. These are, therefore, dynamic, living, and inspiring narratives that can literally effect change. Read in the context of Silko’s novel, such narratives offer a powerful sense of hope in otherwise profoundly hope-­less worlds. The significance of this extra-­textual context for a twenty-­first-century reading of Almanac has been persuasively and astutely explored in the influential critical work of Joni Adamson. Adamson’s explorations of the intersections of Silko’s text with a range of crucially important extra-­textual international developments in the realm of Indigenous cosmopolitics provide an invaluable assessment of the significance of the international visibility now afforded to Indigenous cosmovisions such as the Quechua sumak kawsay. Accordingly, no analysis of the workings of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives in Silko’s work can be complete without a consideration of Adamson’s work, which informs the majority of my readings in this chapter. An overview of some of the pertinent legislative developments informed by Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives is equally essential here. The 2008 revisions to the Ecuadorean Constitution mentioned above built upon the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This specifically recognized ‘that respect for indigenous knowledge, cultures and traditional practices contributes to sustainable and equitable development and proper management of the environment’.2 As Adamson has noted, UNDRIP provided an important international ‘recognition of indigenous cultural legal, and environmental protections’ (2013: 175). Both the revised Ecuadorean Constitution and UNDRIP made traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives internationally visible as powerful alternatives to established patriarchal capitalism, but both were also only the beginning of a series of related legislative measures across South America. The Ecuadorean revisions were closely followed by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME) that emerged from the 2010 Bolivian ‘World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change’. UDRME stated that its objective was to ‘establish the vision and fundamentals of integral development in harmony and balance with Mother Earth to Live Well, guaranteeing the continued capacity of Mother Earth to regenerate natural systems, recuperating and strengthening local and ancestral practices, within the framework of rights, obligations and responsibilities’.3 And UDRME was followed in the same year by Bolivia’s ‘Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra’ (Law of the Rights of Mother Earth), which embraced very similar principles. As Adamson has argued, the significance of UDRME as a piece of international legislation emerges from the declaration of Indigenous delegates ‘that they would no longer be silent’ but ‘would [instead] make themselves visible in international spaces of political negotiation’, because ‘[t]heir authority as politicians’ was based on a ‘cosmic spirituality linked to nature’ thousands of

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years in the making and they would no longer support the economic models promoted by industrialized countries that had radically transformed their relationship to Mother Earth, or ‘Pachamama’ (2012: 144). These developments, Adamson has asserted, ‘are seen by many politicians and academics to indicate a significant “political reconfiguration” taking place in the Americas that centralizes Indigenous understandings of “cosmos”’, a term that is increasingly being used legislatively in the Americas to acknowledge the inseparability of ‘civil rights, human rights, ecological citizenship, and climate justice’ (2013: 175). And the paradigm-­changing nature of these forms of legislation is perhaps most evident in the ‘International Rights of Nature Tribunals’ which emerged from and are mandated by UDRME. Created as a ‘unique, citizen-­created initiative’, the Tribunals are led by a panel of judges ‘consisting of internationally renowned lawyers and leaders for planetary justice’ and provide ‘a vehicle for re-­framing and adjudicating prominent environmental and social justice cases within the context of a Rights of Nature based earth jurisprudence’. Importantly, the Tribunals ‘giv[e] people from all around the world the opportunity to testify publicly as to the destruction of the Earth’, while recognizing that this is ‘destruction that governments and corporations not only allow, but in some cases encourage’. In this context, the Tribunals work within ‘ground breaking new legal structure[s] that fundamentally chang[e] the legal standing of ecosystems’ by refusing to ‘trea[t] nature as property under the law’ but instead allowing ‘[t]he ecosystem itself ’ to ‘be named as a rights bearing subject with standing in a court of law’. The Tribunals therefore ‘provid[e] a framework for educating civil society and governments on the fundamental tenets of Rights of Nature and an instrument for legal experts to examine constructs needed to more fully integrate Rights of Nature’, offer ‘judgments and recommendations for the Earth’s protection and restoration based on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth’, and ‘ha[ve] a strong focus on enabling indigenous peoples and local communities to share their unique concerns and solutions about land, water and culture with the global community’. Perhaps most importantly in the context of Almanac, the Tribunals ‘provid[e] a systemic alternative to environmental protection, [by] acknowledging that ecosystems have the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate their vital cycles’. In this context, the Tribunals use the ‘emerging field of Earth Laws’ to ‘recogniz[e] . . . the crime of Ecocide’ – or the deliberate destruction of the environment – and ‘the laws of the commons’ – or the correct forms of individual behaviour towards shared lands held ‘in common’.4 The concept of the ‘commons’ is crucial here, as this exposes deep underlying cosmopolitical connections between Indigenous groups in the Americas and the poor of Europe: as Peter Linebaugh has persuasively argued in his monograph about the ‘theft’ of common land, Stop, Thief!, the original European conceptualization of the ‘commons’ does not refer solely to either the land or the people but rather the term embodies an undeniable relationship between the two (2014: 18). As Linebaugh has noted, the ‘exchange’ of land use, benefits and eventually ownership of common land

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was in reality an act of theft, by which the majority of the Earth’s natural resources were stolen for the benefit of the elite few, while established human relationships with the natural world in Europe were violently fractured (2014). The Tribunals’ emphasis upon the commons is thus highly significant, and places full focus upon the rights of the Earth and of the many as opposed to the elite status and financial profits of the few. This offers a direct challenge to powerful established elite groups because, as Ché Ramsden has noted, the Tribunals acknowledge that ‘climate crimes’ are ‘deeply connected to other systemic injustices’ such as ‘patriarchy, racism and capitalism’ (2015). Moreover, as Ramsden goes on to assert, the challenge that is offered to patriarchal capitalism via the foregrounding of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives represents a seismic shift in paradigm: this is ‘Pachamama vs [the] “macho papas” ’ (2015). And this point is especially important for a twenty-­first-century reading of Almanac because, as in Silko’s novel, it has become evident that ‘[e]very case presented to the Tribunal showed how violence against nature intersects with violence against people’ (Ramsden 2015). Adamson’s important work in this area engages with these twenty-­firstcentury developments to allow us to read Almanac retrospectively and consider how, when ‘Silko’s [Indigenous resistance] leaders call upon the world’s people to join them as they work for civil and human rights for indigenous, ethnic, and minority groups in every nation and seek legal protections for nature as well’, the language they use ‘sound[s] very much like the language of UNDRIP and UDRME’ (2013: 178). As Adamson’s work has demonstrated, if we are to successfully see ‘part’ of a ‘bigger truth’ in Almanac, then we need to engage with the ways in which extra-­textual Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are operating internationally in the twenty-­first century. This is especially vital given that these extra-­textual twenty-­first-century Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are providing powerful ways in which Almanac’s readers can retrospectively read and interpret the ‘disappearance of all things European’. As Tacho, one of the leaders of the Indigenous ‘Army of Justice’ comments, ‘[t]he white man would someday disappear all by himself. The disappearance had already begun at the spiritual level’, with the result that ‘[a]ll ideas and beliefs of the Europeans would gradually wither and drop away’ (1991: 511). As the title of this chapter suggests, these newly visible cosmopolitical narratives are evidence of Almanac’s suggestion that the Fourth World – the world that Silko identifies as inhabited by the ‘disenfranchised’5 – will soon be eclipsed by a ‘rising’ Fifth World whose very rising will be facilitated by what Almanac’s map identifies as the ‘Indian Connection’. Almanac’s ‘Indian Connection’ points to the emergence of a large pan-­tribal alliance, with representatives from across the Americas converging and collaborating (even if sometimes only tactically or for the short term) from a recognition of shared cosmopolitical interests and aspirations. In this context, these strategic alliances intentionally enable what Leslie Wootten has identified as ‘the common good’ in the text (1997: 63). The very terminology of the ‘Indian Connection’ also has deliberate connotations

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within popular international culture, pointing to the dangerous, the unlawful, and the outlawed, and so demonstrating the threat this ‘connection’ poses to the status quo of patriarchal capitalism. This threat is equally evident in the concept that the Fifth World is ‘rising’ which, while it might connote the ascendancy of a new dawn or era, also signifies the dangers of ‘insurrection’. Importantly, the etymological origins of the term ‘connection’ that derive from the Latin conectere, to ‘join or bind together’ point, like the Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives under discussion here, to the indissoluble bonds of interrelatedness. The ‘disappearance of all things European’ in Almanac is linked directly to the textual – and, increasingly, extra-­textual – Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives that David L. Moore has argued act to ‘slowly erod[e] European projections to the painful point where American may discover itself ’ (2013: 343). In this context, this chapter will explore the figures and spaces through which some of these Indigenous cosmopolitics are narrated; and the ways in which a series of specific textual Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives demonstrate resistance through an erosion of European projections coupled with a recognition of the indissoluble bonds of interrelatedness. Beginning with a consideration of the textual ‘outlaw’ Geronimo, I will consider how the reimagining of Geronimo exposes how European blindness to the world operates, and articulates instead an alternative resistant Indigenous cosmopolitical narrative whose intrinsic interrelatedness illuminates part of a ‘bigger truth’. The following section will assess the physical space provided by the International Holistic Healers’ Convention as a site for cosmopolitical healing in its provision of ‘cures of all kinds’ (1991: 716). And the chapter will conclude with an analysis of two of the Convention’s speakers, the poet-­lawyer Wilson Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi, to assess the ways in which alternative cosmopolitical narratives are actively disseminated within the text.

Seeing ‘with a new and different eye’: Geronimo(s) Much like Marx is reimagined in the pages of Almanac, so too is the historical figure of Geronimo, the nineteenth-­century Chiricahua Apache resistance leader. In Silko’s text, Geronimo continues to represent not only the outlaw and that which is outlawed, but the textually reimagined version can also been seen as an embodiment of the very concept of Indigenous resistance and Revolucíon within Almanac: it is notable, for instance, that Calabazas begins his stories of Geronimo in a chapter entitled ‘Resistance’ within a book called Indian Country (1991: 220). Geronimo occupies a unique extra-­textual historical position, not only as a symbol of ongoing Indigenous resistance, but also paradoxically as a symbol of the successful subjugation of Indigenous peoples in the Southwest during the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. And it is notable that for both opposing popular extra-­textual versions, Geronimo features primarily as a visual image, his narrated story illustrated by and embodied within iconic

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photographic images. Almanac engages directly with these iconic stories and images to dislocate Geronimo from his usual historical position, instead reimagining him as a complex figure who represents not only the concept of the fugitive and the outcast, but also that which has been ‘banished’ from the textual vampire capitalist society, declared ‘criminal’ and so ‘deprived of the benefit and protection of the law’. The outlaw and outlawed status of the textual Geronimo is thus representative of his transformation both textually and extra-­textually into an embodiment of Indigenous resistance, and his status in this context can be detected in the time and resources that the US military devoted to locating and apprehending him. As Calabazas wryly asks at the start of his re-­telling, ‘[h]ow many years had the U.S. army garrisoned five thousand troops in Tucson to chase one old Apache man, twenty-­five or thirty teenagers, and fifty women and small children?’ (1991: 220–1). Yet the story of Geronimo takes on even greater resonance when considered as a narration of Indigenous cosmopolitics, as an example of the ways in which vampire capitalism’s and homosocial patriarchy’s ‘blindness to the world’ operates, and how traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives can allow readers to see parts of a ‘bigger truth’. In this context, the textual Geronimo becomes emblematic of an Indigenous cosmopolitical worldview that has itself been ‘outlawed’ due to its incompatibility with the tenets of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy, and the dangerous challenges it offers to the supremacy of those dominant narratives. From the Yaqui stories retold by Calabazas, Almanac’s reader is given a series of skilfully entwined multiple and conflicting narratives of Geronimo. As the Yaqui elder old Mahawala wryly comments ‘the real man they called Geronimo, they never did catch. The real Geronimo got away’ (1991: 224). ‘Geronimo’ – and so a significant section of American ‘history’ – effectively becomes transformed, translated from the fixed historical figure (and, within the text, the fixed photographic image) instantly recognizable to contemporary Euroamerican society into multiple highly ambiguous individuals. In this sense, the reimagined textual figure of Geronimo is, above all, representative of a sense of hope within Almanac’s death-­worlds: ‘he’ escapes. The textual Geronimo thus becomes countless, moving fluidly – and evasively – from being three, to being four (and back to being three) different men. The ‘real’ textual Geronimo is described as a ‘medicine man’ whose ‘speciality’ is both ‘silence’ and ‘invisibility’; two additional Geronimos are ‘volunteers’ who assume Geronimo’s identity to facilitate his continued freedom; while the final version is an accidentally ‘permanent’ assumption of Geronimo’s identity. Silko increases the confusion by listing four names – Big Pine, Sleet, Wide Ledge, Red Clay – in addition to the deliberate public assumption of Geronimo’s identity by Old Pancakes, who ‘surrenders’ while ‘in character’ but remains trapped as ‘Geronimo’ in captivity (1991: 225, 224). Above all, the Geronimo episode serves to underline both the value of perception, and the dangers of misperception; the suggestion in the text is that if we can correctly ‘see’ and ‘read’ the Geronimo episode, then we have access to at least part of Almanac’s ‘bigger truth’. Appropriately, then, the textual confusion

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over the multiple Geronimos is centred upon a visual image: Almanac very deliberately explores an American ‘reality’ that resides in essentially ‘false’ simulations that are without a referent. It is highly pertinent that, as Eric Anderson has noted, in spite of the popular awareness of his circulated photographic images, Almanac’s Geronimo ‘moves outside the frames’ of the photographic image as his strategies are shown to ‘far exceed the capabilities of Euro-American technologies to contain and interpret him’ (1999: 65). Much like the technological manipulations of the old Yupik woman, Lecha and Awa Gee, the multiple textual Geronimos are able to manipulate photographic technologies via the ‘huge quartz crystal’ that powers the camera, so that the photographic images show what the Geronimos want it to show: the ‘same’ man regardless of whose photograph is taken (1991: 228). In this manner the extra-­textual historical image of Geronimo is exposed, as Moore has persuasively argued, as a ‘colonial sign’, and so the textually reimagined multiple ‘Geronimo’ becomes representative of the inherent dangers of mistaking the sign for the signified (1999: 170, 168). As Almanac wryly comments: ‘[t]he tribal people here were all very aware that the whites put great store in names. But once the whites had a name for a thing, they seemed unable ever again to recognize the thing itself’ because ‘Europeans suffered a sort of blindness to the world’ (1991: 224–5, emphasis added). While, as Moore has commented, the story clearly demonstrates the ‘voyeuristic blindness of colonialism’, it nonetheless also exposes the dangerous blindness of a worldview that rejects interrelatedness in favour of separation and hierarchical categorization (1999: 169). As the excerpt above demonstrates, Almanac makes it ironically and painfully clear that taxonomic categorization – the naming of things – does not constitute knowledge or understanding, and much less recognition. Even more importantly, Almanac’s multiple Geronimos show us that this very blindness to the non-­ human world results in a powerful form of fear that reacts destructively to what it cannot fully know or understand without a dramatic shift in epistemology. Through the figure of Geronimo, Almanac’s readers can trace the ways in which the fundamental interrelatedness and obligations of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives both challenge and erode the narratives of patriarchal capitalism. As the passage cited above suggests, the narratives of science and technology not only mistake the signifier for the signified, but advocate an approach to the world that is predicated upon the wilful lack of understanding inbuilt within Christian, Cartesian, and Linnaean taxonomies, and which result in a human inability to fully ‘recognize’ the non-­human world. By contrast, Almanac’s readers are shown the successful ‘escape’ of the ‘real’ Geronimos, who are accidentally supplanted by the substitute ‘Old Pancakes’, to demonstrate how this ‘escape story’ offers the kind of hope that facilitates the continuance of both Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives and Indigenous resistance. The inability of the US troops to recognize the ‘real’ Geronimo, their inability to perceive that the ‘Geronimo’ that is pursued is actually three, and sometimes four, separate men, is equated to their blindness to the landscape features that all ‘looked the

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same to them’ because they cannot perceive their relationship to the Earth. In direct contrast, the Yaqui and Apache tribal peoples are presented as skilled strategists precisely because they can recognize and read the natural world and their relationship to it. And so the Yaquis and Apaches are ‘all very aware’ that a rock is not ‘just a ‘rock’ but is made ‘unique’ – much like Geronimo himself – by its ‘obvious’ physical differences (1991: 224, 225). This awareness exposes the interdependency of the relationship, the kinship, between humans and the natural world because, as Almanac quite specifically comments, ‘the position of the rock’ is quite clearly ‘relative’ – in every sense of the word – ‘to all things around it’ (1991: 224, emphasis added). Almanac’s discussions of the power of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives – a power that is evident in the successful escape of three of the four ‘Geronimos’ – can be read in the context of the kinds of ground-­breaking extra-­ textual twenty-­first-century developments that Adamson has identified in the UNDRIP and UDRME legislations. Writing about Diné cosmopolitical narratives just after Almanac’s publication in 1992, Robert S. McPherson engaged with very similar extra-­textual traditional and established Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives to note that the land itself is a form of narrative: storied places inform those able to read them of the ‘correct’ and most appropriate way to live. While this suggestion is clearly in accord with Ann Brigham’s argument, cited in the last chapter, that the ‘land is both material and narrative’ (2004: 305). McPherson argues further that, within Diné cosmopolitics, the non-­human world becomes a ‘moral code’ for its human relatives and inhabitants (1992: 3). The title of McPherson’s study, Sacred Land, Sacred View, indicates that it is not just the landscape that is sacred but the very nature of Indigenous cosmopolitical perceptions. In the context of Almanac’s exploration of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives, McPherson’s explanation of this complex correlation is particularly pertinent: the Earth is ‘not just a series of dramatically poised topographic features that incite the wonder of man or beckon for exploitation’ but rather ‘a living breathing entity’ in a universe that is undeniably ‘animate’ (1992: 11). Importantly, these Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives include the totality of the natural world, and McPherson has noted that the inclusion of all non-­human or extra-­human entities emphasizes humanity’s relationship with, and inseparability from, every aspect of the universe. In this context, McPherson has argued that, from a Diné cosmopolitical perspective, to ignore this fact ‘is to ignore the purpose of life, the meaning of existence’ (1991: 11). Silko’s reimagining of the historical figure of Geronimo in Almanac engages directly with the meaning of human existence to consider the ways in which Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives expose the symbiotic nature of human inter-­relationships with the Earth. As Keith H. Basso asserted in his seminal work on the relationship between language and landscape amongst the Western Apache, those human-­land interrelationships are evident in the ways in which the meaning of human existence is embodied within the earthly ‘wisdom’ that

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quite literally ‘sits in places’ (1996). In this sense, Basso has argued that Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives anchor human lives and identities to the Earth in ways that enable ‘portions of the past’ to be ‘brought into being’, and so the Earth itself, importantly, offers us an ‘eyewitness voice’ (1996: xv, 13). For twenty-­first-century readers, the importance of this concept is evident in the extra-­textual context of the International Rights of Nature Tribunals, where the Earth is not only acknowledged as an eyewitness to its own violent abuses but identified as a ‘rights bearing subject with standing in a court of law’. This notion of the eyewitness voice of the Earth requires a profound alteration of perspective and paradigm. In its narration of Indigenous cosmopolitics via the figure of Geronimo, Almanac offers its readers that alteration of perspective and paradigm through its presentation of a viable alternative to the textual narratives of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy that gives us the opportunity to attempt to view the world from a different perspective. Almanac thus offers a direct challenge to established processes of taxonomic organization and cartographic mapping as the only ways to understand and interact with the world; turning these erasing processes back upon themselves to ‘un-­earth’ and re-­establish the elided geo-­cultural formulations of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives. It is no coincidence that, in remembering the captured ‘Geronimo’ Old Pancakes, Calabazas also remembers the other noted Chiricahua Apache resistance leader Cochise, who is reported to have commented at the end of his life that ‘the world the whites brought with them would not last. It would be swept away in a giant gust of wind’ (1991: 235). Encouraged to listen to the textual land’s ‘eyewitness voice’, Almanac’s readers are encouraged above all to engage with the textual Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives, in order to see ‘with a new and different eye’ (Basso 1992: 104).

‘Cures of all kinds’: the International Holistic Healers’ Convention That a ‘new and different eye’ is needed is everywhere apparent in Almanac’s textual violences. While traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are newly visible in the twenty-­first century due to international legislation such as UNDRIP and UDRME, there is a continued popular blind belief in the power of science and a firm popular scepticism about the very possibility of viable alternatives to established patriarchal capitalist narratives. And this is hardly surprising: a challenge to the established patriarchal capitalist narrative is a direct challenge to the power of elite interests, both textually and extra-­textually. Yet it is clear from the extra-­textual scientific evidence being collected by twenty-­first-century climate change research that a very real and growing threat to human lives is emerging from the ways in which we see and treat our environments. As the scientific expert and climate change activist Professor David Suzuki has argued, ‘[w]e need to have a paradigm shift; to me the paradigm shift is that we have to see the world as Indigenous people see it’

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(Watson 2017). For Suzuki, it is clear from the scientific evidence that we are heading towards ecological disaster in the early twenty-­first century, and the only solution is to recognize that Indigenous understandings of our relationship as humans to our environment are not ‘romanti[c], poeti[c] or metaphorica[l]’ but rather literal: ‘[w]e are of the Earth, every cell in our bodies formed by molecules derived from plants and animals, inflated by water, energized by sunlight captured through photosynthesis and ignited by atmospheric oxygen’ (2016, emphasis added). Suzuki’s conclusion, that ‘We are the world’ and ‘we must act on that understanding’ is the starting point of my discussion here of the textual spaces that offer the opportunity for a shift of paradigm (2016). The ‘space’ required to see ‘with a new and different eye’ is provided within the text by the International Holistic Healers’ Convention. As Adamson has noted, the space presented by the International Holistic Healers’ Convention makes it clear that Silko was attempting to illuminate possibilities for bringing together not just indigenous groups, but innovative coalitions working for an alternative modernity in which all people have a voice in democratic processes at the regional, national, and international levels, and in which a ‘counter space’ is opened for legitimately calling for the right of ‘Mother Earth’ to maintain and regenerate the life cycles necessary to the survival of all living beings. (2014: 188)

In this sense, we can read Almanac’s International Holistic Healers’ Convention as representative of what Linebaugh has identified as space of ‘reciprocity’ or ‘commonality’ (2014: 19). The International Holistic Healers’ Convention is the point at which all of the powerful alternative Indigenous and non-Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives converge. Here, a series of influential textual figures and groups come together, including representatives of the two ‘People’s Armies’ of the Americas and eco-­ warrior activists such as Green Vengeance, and ‘technorevolutionaries’ such as Awa Gee. The International Holistic Healers’ Convention therefore is also an important point at which the holism of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives can be foregrounded. The Convention has specifically been ‘called by natural and indigenous healers to discuss the earth’s crisis’ (1991: 718). For Almanac’s twenty-­first-century readers, therefore, the Convention can be read in the context of subsequent extra-­textual developments such as the 2010 ‘World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change’. Organized primarily due to the perceived failure of the United Nations climate talks of 2009, the ‘World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change’ was first and foremost centred on the many – on the ‘Worlds Peoples’ – and not just the few – the diplomatic and political elites who had attended the UN climate talks. Most significantly, it was the ‘World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change’ that resulted in positive, definitive, and affirmative eco-­political action recognizing the holism of

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Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives: the introduction and establishment of both UDRME and the ‘International Rights of Nature Tribunals’. Retrospectively read in this context, the International Holistic Healers’ Convention is thus an important site for developing and promoting the understanding that all parts of the ‘whole’ are ‘intimately related’ and ultimately ‘indivisible’, and that recognition of this fact is fundamental to the process of understanding the world around us. Thus Almanac tells us that the Convention is the space in which ‘medicine makers’ offer ‘cures of all kinds’ (1991: 716). This last point is vital: to ‘cure’ is to ‘offer relief ’, to offer a ‘permanent solution or remedy’ for any ills, to ensure ‘recovery’. Moreover, the etymological origin of ‘cure’ in the Latin cura suggests that the textual cures offered provide ‘care’, ‘attention’, ‘treatment’ and ‘spiritual charge’. Most significantly, the Latin cura translates as the ‘cure of souls’, and this point is crucial since, as Lecha notes, the Convention is attended by white Euroamericans filled with an ‘urgency and desperation’ that derives from their spiritual emptiness, from their dependence on a ‘ “Mother Church” [that] was a cannibal monster’ because of the ‘tortures and executions performed in the name of Jesus’ (1991: 718, 717). For Lecha, it is this violent history that results in a ‘precarious spiritual health’ for Europeans, who can sense that ‘a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal’ (1991: 718). This spiritual void is most evident in the desperation of the Europeans searching for meaning in the modern world, in the ‘deep sense that something had been lost’ that marks those searches (1991: 718). In this context, it is important that the International Holistic Healers’ Convention is a space within which the harmful narratives of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy are also given room. And thus Lecha gives us clear examples of the ways in which attempts to co-­opt Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are made by ‘new-­age spiritualists who claimed to have been trained by 110-year-­old Huichol Indians’, by ‘white men from California in expensive new buckskins, beads and feathers’, and by ‘white-­haired old hippies’ (1991: 716, 719). While such examples of ‘scattered crazies’ (1991: 755) serve to throw the holism of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives into sharp relief, it is clear that they also act as a warning: as they also serve, as Sarah Jaquette Ray has commented, to show that ‘[i]ndigenous groups risk cultural appropriation when they build coalitions’ (2013: 12). In spite of this, however, it is clear that the Convention also acts as a space of redistribution, where wealth can be redistributed from the few to the many, where ‘[m]oney . . . . seemed to drop effortlessly from the white hands into the brown and the black hands’ (1991: 719). In this sense, the redistribution of wealth is ‘subversive’ because, as I have argued elsewhere, it goes to ‘fund the types of radical political action that are required to force fundamental . . . [epistemological] change and to promote cultural and spiritual healing’ (2007a: 160). As I have previously argued, the Convention therefore has a very real significance as a ‘demarcated textual space’ within which ‘the oppressed of many nations and cultures’ can come together and within which important Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives can be disseminated even in the presence of dominant

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oppressive narratives (2007a: 155, 154). Moreover, the Convention is a space within which the concept of healing is inextricably connected to the concept of ‘political action’ and even ‘militant . . . activism (Tillett 2007a: 154). Indeed, Almanac’s use of the term ‘convention’ is itself interesting, and suggests that what happens in the Convention’s textual space is in effect ‘the accepted way that things are usually done’. Further, the term ‘convention’ denotes that which is ‘both holistic and political’, it is ‘a “contract” or “agreement” between states for [the] regulation of matters affecting all of them’ (Tillett 2007a: 156). While the Convention ‘showcases’ a series of powerful speeches and performances – for instance, Green Vengeance, discussed in the previous chapter, and Wilson Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi, discussed in the final section of this chapter – it also provides a collaborative space where there is potential for what both Ray and Adamson identify as ‘coalition’, or the ‘temporary alliance’ of individuals and groups for the purpose of ‘combined action’ (2013: 177; 2012a, 148). The ‘transnational indigenous alliance’ within Almanac thus seeks, as Adamson has contended, to ‘illustrate’ and combat the kinds of destructive ‘modern forces’ of ‘large-­scale cultural, economic, political and ecological processes’ that have been identified in the twenty-­first century as ‘mak[ing] modern indigenous groups and ecosystems more vulnerable to social and environmental injustices’ (2012a: 149). And, as Ray has noted, while any such coalition might be ‘strategic and even effective’, it must also constantly ward against being or becoming ‘ethically flawed’ (2013: 13). In this context, the dissemination of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives and their reception by non-Indigenous groups become central to Almanac’s textual politics: much like twenty-­first-century legislative processes such as UNDRIP and UDRME, it is clear that an embracing of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives is a pre-­requisite. And, in this context, the Mayan twins Tacho/Wacah and El Feo make it clear that ‘[c]onverts were always welcome; Mother Earth embraced the souls of all who loved her’ (1991: 736). This is perhaps especially evident in the focal point of the International Holistic Healers’ Convention, the ‘meeting in Room 1212’. Here, representatives of the two ‘People’s Armies’ of the Americas – the Mayan Angelita La Escapía and black Indian Clinton – meet with influential textual figures such as the Yaqui twins Lecha and Zeta, Eskimo Rose, the Yaqui Calabazas, the Lakota Wilson Weasel Tail, and the transnationally connected Barefoot Hopi. The meeting in Room 1212 creates ‘a network of tribal coalitions’ which, in its ‘dedicat[ion] to the retaking of ancestral lands by indigenous peoples’ (1991: 737), is shown to be truly cosmopolitical, a combination of cosmovision and political action. In this context it is significant that, while the individuals ‘meeting in Room 1212’ spend the evening discussing and trying to find agreement on the ‘right’ path forward, there is nonetheless much disagreement. Against the peaceful protest advocated by the Mayan twins Tacho/Wacah and El Feo which might take ‘a hundred years of spirit voices and simple population growth’, Almanac’s readers are shown Angelita’s firm belief in acquiring ‘the

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weapons she needed to protect the [people]’ that derive from her own ‘furious’ spirit voices that are telling her to ‘defend the people from attack’ (1991: 713). Against the Barefoot Hopi’s firm belief that ‘the recovery of the Americas could take place without bloodshed’, which resonates with Calabazas’s belief that ‘change was in motion and was a process that had never stopped’ and Wilson Weasel Tail’s desire for ‘peaceful revolutio[n]’, we see Zeta’s quiet agreement to supply missiles to Angelita, and Lecha’s deep suspicion that because the ‘American continents were already soaked with . . . blood’ there is no escape from the fact that ‘violence begat violence’ (1991: 739–40). And, against the Barefoot Hopi’s belief in a ‘national or even multinational prison uprising’, we are shown not only Calabazas’s fear that such prison uprisings would ‘deteriorate into race riots’ as ‘the battle lines would fall along skin color’, but also Clinton’s experiences in Vietnam and with the Army of the Homeless which lead him to the more positive belief that whites and blacks can ‘work together’ for the ‘common cause’ of ‘survival’ (1991: 737–8). Even within the Barefoot Hopi’s own philosophy, we see seemingly contradictory assertions of violent prison uprising with ‘peaceful and gradual changes’ (1991: 739). And these contradictions are, of course, central to Almanac’s message: as Channette Romero has commented, Silko deliberately leaves open ‘the possibility that this revolution could combine both spiritual and military action’, and there is a very real sense in the text that multiple forms of resistance will be required (2002: 635). Moreover, as T. V. Reed has argued, not only does ‘[t]his kind of creative tension . . . typif[y] the global justice movement at its best’, but it also serves to demonstrate Almanac’s wider contention that successful Revolucíon requires diversity as a means by which ‘each will see part’ of a bigger ‘truth’ (2009: 36). It is via this kind of creative tension, via this kind of awareness of multiple forms of resistance that Almanac’s characters can, as Adamson has noted, ‘undo, or more accurately, unlearn, a single ontology of politics and thus create possibilities for new interpretations and actions’ (2014: 185–6). In this context, it is clear from the meeting in Room 1212 that what begins to emerge is a sense of what Linebaugh has termed ‘commonality’ (2014: 19) or, as I have already noted, what Wootten has identified as ‘political action’ that is undertaken ‘for the common good’ (1997: 63). The International Holistic Healers’ Convention is, therefore, crucial as a site for both resistance and the dissemination of resistance. However, what becomes apparent to Almanac’s readers is that the Convention is equally crucial as the site where the ability to see with a ‘new and different eye’, to recognize the validity and value of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives, is also the ability to see that those very narratives are the ‘cure’ for the ills of patriarchal capitalism.

Making connections: Wilson Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi I will conclude this chapter with a consideration of two of the public ‘performances’ at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention, by Wilson

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Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi, to assess some of the ways in which Almanac’s alternative Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are effectively disseminated. While the International Holistic Healers’ Convention quite clearly allows a commodification and appropriation of Indigenous identities in its inclusion of a range of dubious white ‘healers’, it is equally clear that it nonetheless acts as a site through which, as Eva Cherniavsky has commented, ‘the historical and political content of the tribal peoples message infiltrates the political unconscious of the consumer public’ (2001: 122). In this context, it is also clear that the performances of both Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi are also ‘performative’; in other words, they are deliberately and consciously constructed to convey and disseminate a specific identity or idea. For instance, Lecha quite openly comments not only that Weasel Tail presents a ‘spectacle’, but also that ‘the Hopi’s performance had been flawless . . . . [he] seemed to know exactly what the audience wanted to hear’ (1991: 733). Moreover, as Ray has argued, ‘[t]he Barefoot Hopi’s promise of “all human beings belong[ing] to the Earth forever” is portrayed by Silko as rhetoric deployed to persuade environmentalists to finance revolution on indigenous terms’ (2013: 123, original emphasis). It is certainly true that, as Ray goes on to assert,‘[i]ndigenous groups use the stereotype of the ecological Indian to their own advantage’ and that ‘vulnerable groups “perform” mainstream environmental sensibilities to gain white support’ (2103: 124). However, it is important to note that performativity itself is defined, as Jillian R. Cavanaugh has argued, in linguistic terms as the ‘power of language to effect change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead (or also) function as a form of social action’ (2015, emphasis added). In this context, while both Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi give the people ‘what they want’, they both also act to disseminate vitally important Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives that must be recognized and embraced if we are to ‘act on th[e] understanding’ that ‘[w]e are the world’ as Suzuki argues that we must (2016, emphasis added). The performances of both Wilson Weasel Tail and the Barefoot Hopi thus act not simply to ‘give the people what they want’ but specifically to effect the kind of ‘paradigm shift’ that Suzuki has asserted is fundamental to the very survival of human beings (Watson 2017). In this sense, both Weasel Tail and the Hopi ‘make connections’, and my analysis will here consider the range of connections that are made. Almanac’s readers are first introduced to the Lakota ‘poet-­lawyer’ Wilson Weasel Tail through the observations of Lecha, who has appeared with Weasel Tail on a TV talk show (1991: 713). Echoing Silko’s own extra-­textual experiences, Weasel Tail has ‘dropped out of . . . Law School to devote himself to poetry’, as he reasons that ‘lawyers were the disease not the cure’ because ‘[t]he law served the rich’, whereas ‘poetry would set people free’ (1991: 713). Using his TV appearance as a ‘spectacle’ to make an ‘indictment’ in poetry ‘against the United States of America and all other colonials’, Weasel Tail makes a spectacle by being arrested live on air (1991: 713–15). However, Weasel Tail’s

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performance at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention can be read as one of the ‘cures of all kinds’ via its examination of the power of memory. Susan Scarberry has argued that memory is ‘medicine’, and that memory thus represents a ‘powerful’ and potentially curative ‘life force’, and this is certainly true of the ways in which Weasel Tail deploys memory (1989: 22). As I have argued elsewhere, memory in Almanac operates as ‘a potent political textual force and embodies Silko’s [own] commitment to anamnesis, or the refusal to forget’ (2007a: 162). This is crucial to any reading of Weasel Tail’s performance which demonstrates the political significance of memory that, as Joanne Rappaport has argued, lies in its ability to ‘move people into action’ (1990: 189). Weasel Tail’s performance thus opens with a paraphrase of Pontiac’s address detailing the dangers of forgetfulness, and warning that the result of forgetfulness, of ‘forg[etting] everything you were told’, is ‘greed’, ‘[t]reachery’, ‘betray[al]’, ‘envy’ and ‘poiso[n]’ (1991: 721). Significantly, the focal point of Weasel Tail’s own address is a ‘re-­vision’ of the Ghost Dance. Although the Ghost Dance participants ‘dance to remember’, Weasel Tail makes it clear to his audience that the power of the dance does not lies in its ability to offer physical protection from bullets, but rather in its spiritual and cosmopolitical ability ‘to promote the curative power of remembrance’ (Tillett 2007a: 163). Weasel Tail’s invocation of the Ghost Dance draws on extra-­textual historical Euroamerican fears over the power of the original late nineteenth-­century Ghost Dancers to incite resistance and even open rebellion, and the memories of those fears, however buried. And those half-­forgotten memories are played upon by Weasel Tail in his assertion that ‘[t]he Ghost Dance has never ended’, that ‘the people have never stopped dancing’, that those people are ‘joined’ by their dead ancestors ‘who cry out, who demand justice, and who call for the people to take back the Americas!’ (1991: 724). In this context, Weasel Tail’s textual deployment of the Ghost Dance shows that the Ghost Dance is operating as what Edward Huffstetler has identified as a ‘nexus of resistance’ (2002: 5). Weasel Tail’s most challenging proclamation is therefore his declaration that ‘[s]ixty million dead souls howl for justice in the Americas!’ (1991: 723). This point is important because, as Huffstetler has noted, Almanac repeatedly shows us that ‘the people’s revolution itself is the wis[h] of the ancestors, the spirit beings, and by extension, the land itself ’ (2002: 12). Here, Silko’s novel can be retrospectively read very productively in the context of the newly visible forms of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives in the twenty-­first century, which not only recognize the ‘wishes’ of the ancestors and the land but have enshrined in law the rights of those sentient entities to have their wishes acknowledged and acted upon. As Adamson has argued, in the twenty-­first century, it is clear that Indigenous groups are ‘upsetting notions of who can be a politician or what can be considered a political issue’ by ‘[a]llowing earth-­ beings to count in political negotiations’ in order to ‘open’ a ‘space for contemplation’, and ensuring that ‘[a]ll proposals would be on the table, and all stakeholders, including earth-­beings, would be at the table’ (2013: 192). Weasel

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Tail’s performance, which ends in ‘a standing ovation’ (1991: 725), calls specifically for his primarily white Euroamerican audience to make connections. In part, those connections demand the kind of dramatic change of paradigm advocated by Suzuki, so that we can truly understand that ‘we are the world’, and that ‘worlds that are divergent from the one described by Western science have never ceased to exist’ (Adamson 2013: 191). Yet, Weasel Tail’s connections also demand that we recognize and celebrate diversity; that we recognize, as Adamson has argued, that the world is not a ‘universe’ but a ‘pluriverse’ and so ‘offer respect to a planet considered sentient’ (2013: 191). The Barefoot Hopi has a similarly rapturous reception from his white Euroeamerican audience; however, Almanac’s readers are told upon his introduction much earlier that this is because the Hopi has the ability to ‘dreamwalk’: the Hopi, ‘with the help of the spirits’, can ‘infiltrate th[e] dreams’ of potential coalition members to ‘urge [them] to rise up’ (1991: 620, 617). While it remains unclear how many dreams he has infiltrated amongst the audience for his performance, there is nonetheless the suggestion that, as Cherniavsky has noted, ‘the efficacy of the Hopi’s words depends on the prior receptivity of his listeners’ and this is a ‘receptivity made possible . . . by his access to the register of dreams’ (2001: 120). In this sense, the Hopi ‘makes connections’ via dreams; and, importantly, here the term ‘dreams’ takes on its full meaning in terms of ‘aspirations’, ‘ambitions’, ‘desires’ as the Hopi’s dream messages draw upon and disseminate traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical stories. And so the written correspondence the Hopi sends to already receptive convicts within the US penal system ‘consisted of the Hopi’s stories about the Corn Mother, Old Spider Woman, and the big snake’ (1991: 620). In this way, the connections that the Hopi has made are not simply political but cosmopolitical; the Hopi connects ‘even redneck bikers’ to the alternative visions and futures that are made possible by traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives. In this manner, Cherniavsky has argued, those who are subject to the Hopi’s dreamwalking ‘no longer retain the privilege of knowledge through assimilation, but rather are induced to assimilate . . . what they do not know – a tribal vision of the world and its futures’ (2001: 120). The Hopi therefore acts to disrupt the established narratives of patriarchal capitalism: as Adamson has suggested, the Hopi causes an ‘epistemic rupture’, his very insistence on going barefoot ‘creates a spectacle that interrupts the “logic” undergirding the [established] political and scientific rationales’ of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy (2012: 151). And the Hopi’s international connections – he has travelled a decolonized Africa to gain political and economic support for similar Indigenous de-­colonial projects – can also be very productively read within twenty-­first-century extra-­textual developments: as Adamson has noted, the Hopi ‘clearly represents the many leaders who have worked successfully in international spaces of negotiation’ and his ‘words anticipate the revised constitutions, declarations, and laws being ratified in Latin America today’ (2012: 151).

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The Hopi makes powerful connections in person via his performative address at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention, where his audience are so ‘mesmerized by the Hopi’s voice’ that they ‘rise to their feet simultaneously’ because ‘men and women both, had fallen in love with the strong and resonant voice which promised that all human beings belonged to the earth forever’ (1991: 734). While Lecha is sceptical about the Hopi’s motivations, it is nonetheless clear that the Hopi is represented here as a powerful storyteller. And Almanac’s readers are encouraged to compare the Hopi to Angelita’s readings of the textual Marx, to understand the possibilities that lie in the widespread dissemination of the Hopi’s traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives. If we read the Hopi in this context, then we can see the ‘powerful spirits’ that reside within his ‘sacred’ stories; we can see that, like Marx, the Hopi’s ‘magical assembly of stories’ has the power to ‘cure the suffering and evils of the world by [its] . . . retelling’ (1991: 316). And, most importantly, the Hopi’s performative stories at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention (and within his dreamwork) act to make connections, to ensure that his new audiences know that they ‘d[o] not struggle alone’ (1991: 520). In this context, the Hopi’s dissemination of traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives at the Convention engages with and extends the kinds of storytelling power that Angelita has identified within Marx’s words, to put Indigenous cosmopolitical understandings at the centre of the wider narrative. Like Marx, the Hopi demonstrates that resistance and Revolucíon are possible, but only if we understand that the violences enacted by patriarchal capitalism against our freedoms, futures and hope are identical to the violences enacted against the Earth. And this point is crucial: while the Hopi’s planned insurrection against the forces of patriarchal capitalism is an ‘international coordinated effort’ in terms of its human participants, it is also an insurrection that waits upon the readiness of the Earth itself as the primary actor (1991: 731). Like Weasel Tail, the Hopi recognizes that a successful challenge to the dominant paradigm is dependent upon ‘the right moment’, upon the readiness of all participants, including the dead. And so a successful challenge is dependent upon ‘certain conjunctions between the spirit forces of wind, fire, water, and mountain with the spirit forces of the people, the living and the dead’ (1991: 618–19). The significance of the performances at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention, and of the meeting in Room 1212, can be detected in the Hopi’s ‘entire philosophy’, which itself reflects what Almanac terms the ‘Earth’s outrage’ at its abuse (1991: 617, 618). The Hopi’s philosophy is one of inevitability: ‘a day would come as had not been seen in five thousand years. On this day . . . everywhere at once, spontaneously, the prisoners, the slaves, and the dispossessed would rise up’ (1991: 617). Echoing the repeated and repeating story in the physical textual almanac that ‘one day a story will arrive at your town’, the Hopi’s performance here not only centralizes traditional Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives but, within the extra-­textual context of increasing ecological damage and increasing popular concerns over the realities of climate change, also points

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to the inevitability of cosmopolitical change. Accordingly, the next chapter will focus on the practical ways in which Almanac depicts the inevitability of cosmopolitical change through a consideration of two key components of Almanac’s demand for resistance and Revolucíon: the two textual ‘armies’. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which ‘coalition’ might work in this instance, and the role played by Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives, the next chapter will first explore the American ‘Army of the Homeless’ also known as the ‘Army of Justice’, before moving on to the Latin American ‘Army of the Poor’ also known as the ‘Army of Justice and Redistribution’. In both cases, my analyses will explore the ways in which alternative Indigenous and non-Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives are disseminated and deployed to challenge the primacy of the dominant narratives of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy. And, most importantly, my analyses will make extra-­textual connections, to consider both Armies within late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-century international socio-­political acts of popular resistance and their causes. In this context, the next chapter will assess the international impact of the ongoing global recession (2008–), especially upon international politics; the significance and motivations of popular resistance movements and uprisings such as the Arab Spring (2010) and the international Occupy movement (2011–); and the complex relationships between Almanac’s textual cosmopolitics and the cosmopolitical narratives of the Zapatista uprising (1994–) and the internationally significant Idle No More movement (2012–).

Notes 1 Oliver Balch, ‘Buen vivir: The Social Philosophy Inspiring Movements in South America’ (The Guardian, 4 February 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/ sustainable-­business/blog/buen-­vivir-philosophy-­south-america-­eduardo-gudynas, emphasis added. 2 For the full text of UNDRIP, see http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/ DRIPS_en.pdf. 3 For an overview, see http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/law/the-­motherearth-­law-and-­integral-development-­to-live-­well-law-­no-300/. 4 For full details of the Tribunal’s organization, remit and history, see http:// therightsofnature.org/rights-­of-nature-­tribunal/, with details for the Paris 2015 meeting, see http://therightsofnature.org/rights-­of-nature-­tribunal-paris/. 5 Silko, cited in Ellen Arnold, Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 156.

Chapter 7 A rmies o f J ustice : T extual and E xtra -T extual ‘R evoluc íon ’

Silko’s evocation of the coming revolution offers no blueprints or predictions as to how events will unfold . . . . she offers multiple, contradictory, equally possible versions of the form the coming revolution will take, ranging from a revolution in consciousness to nonviolent material struggle to armed rebellion. We do know that the revolutionary forces will be a rainbow.1 As T. V. Reed’s words above suggest, Almanac is a consciously open-­ended text which makes no pronouncements about what forms resistance or Revolucíon will take, but instead offers ‘multiple, contradictory, [and] equally possible versions’. This is vitally important to the dissemination of Almanac’s cosmopolitical narratives and reiterates the Barefoot Hopi’s message discussed in the previous chapter: the forms of xresistance and Revolucíon are immaterial because both are inevitable. It is this sense of textual inevitability that, as I discussed in the very first chapter of this study, caused early critics such as Sven Birkerts to dismiss Silko’s novel as ‘naïve to the point of silliness’ because this kind of ‘revolutionary insurrection is tethered to airy nothing’ (1992: 41). This may have been the case during the years immediately after the publication of Silko’s novel, but for Almanac’s twenty-­first-century readers the extra-­textual context is no longer quite so clearly defined. In foregrounding Almanac’s textual armies, this chapter will reconsider and re-­read Silko’s textual revolucíons within a twenty-­first-century context to take into account events of more recent years that involve popular insurrection in an attempt to avoid the kinds of reductive critical misreadings of Almanac that are, unfortunately, still occurring.2 My argument here traces the causes of those insurrections, and thinks through the effects of the kinds of violent controls and indiscriminate abuses of extra-­textual patriarchal capitalism that we see replicated in graphic detail in Silko’s novel. From a twenty-­first-century perspective, it is increasingly clear that Almanac’s textual cosmopolitical narrative not only taps into the Zeitgeist of the time of its composition in the 1980s, but also very successfully anticipates the kinds of extra-­textual political

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and cosmopolitical developments that have occurred since its publication. In particular, my argument in this final chapter assesses Almanac’s two textual armies to consider how a series of late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-century international acts of popular resistance – and, importantly, their causes – can themselves be retrospectively read within the context of Almanac’s cosmopolitical narrative of inevitability. To return to one of Silko’s assertions that I discussed right at the start of this study, the irredeemability of capitalism lies in the fact that its driving force is to ‘trample-­people-into-­the-dirt’ and ‘destroy-­the-Earth’ (Arnold 1998: 24). The driving force of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy, both textually and extra-­textually, is therefore a distinct lack of obligation; indeed, patriarchal capitalism is built upon the concept that there are no obligations. For capitalism to work effectively, we must embrace violent competition by denying our relatedness. It is this ideology, disseminated within both the textual and the dominant extra-­textual narratives, that enables and facilitates the violent control of the majority who are assigned to the kinds of ‘death-­worlds’ that we see depicted in Silko’s novel. Importantly, what we see in a twenty-­first-century reading of Almanac are the ways in which a series of extra-­textual moments of resistance demonstrate how our obligations and our meeting of those obligations remain significant for a range of highly diverse international groups, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. As I have argued elsewhere: the twentieth anniversary year of Almanac’s publication, 2011, witnessed not only the effects of uncontrolled neoliberalist policy in the worst global economic recession since the 1930s, but also popular responses to that recession, and to the economic inequalities and social injustices that are becoming ever more apparent in the drive toward the ‘market fundamentalism’ of a global economy controlled by self- selected ‘elite’ national interests . . . or by corporate interests, answerable to no one. (2013: 19)

The global financial recession since 2008, which impacted on existing problems caused by the 2007 sub-­prime mortgage crisis in the United States, has had an international impact upon the very poorest peoples of the world. In this context, it should be no surprise that the term the ‘Great Recession’ has emerged to identify our current ongoing period of economic disruption. And, through the ‘austerity’ programmes of a series of ‘economically advanced’ countries, it has become increasingly clear that poverty is now the province of the majority and not the minority in almost every country of the world. As a direct response to the 2008 global financial crisis, most ‘developed’ countries adopted ‘austerity measures’ which, in the majority of cases, meant a severe limiting of public spending in order to ‘balance’ the national ‘books’. While the definition of austerity points to ‘enforced or extreme economy especially on a national scale’, there are nonetheless uneasy echoes of 1980s

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rhetoric within the austerity narratives of the twenty-­first century. In the continued public insistence that we ‘live within our means’, and the linking of this to public and private sector pay caps for workers but not for the wealthy elites, there is a very real – and I would argue deliberate – suggestion that the ongoing international financial crisis is individual and not systemic. Acting to deflect attention from the causes of the global financial crisis – the reckless and irresponsible gambling that has been undertaken by individual bankers and by banking institutions – this elite rhetoric points the finger of blame at the people: we are responsible not only for our own poverty but for national poverty more widely. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the popular reaction to this kind of rhetoric in the 1980s was an ‘eager[ness] to disassociate’ from the poor and ‘align . . . with the dominant narrative’ of wealth (Cassiman 2007: 58). However, the problem we have in the twenty-­first century are the sheer numbers of those defined as ‘poor’. In 2017, as I write, international austerity policies are almost a decade old, there has been very little economic benefit, but rather the exacerbation of the economic suffering of the majority worldwide. Indeed, what has been seen internationally has been ongoing cuts to public services such as education and health, cuts to welfare payments for the unemployed and the disabled, and – in the UK – cuts to the tax credits for working families paid to ‘top up’ low pay. Moreover, when rising inflation is taken into account, the pay freezes for workers are in reality pay cuts. Vast numbers of working people in many countries are now identified as ‘poor’ or as ‘just about managing’ (JAMs), and this shift in numbers not only resembles what we see in Almanac, but also resonates disturbingly with the forms of textual resistance that we see emerge as a direct result of imposed poverty. While the Reagan administration in the 1980s could successfully claim that poverty was self-­made and the fault of individuals, since 2008 it has become increasingly evident that poverty is manufactured, with the means of its manufacture increasingly visible and undeniable. In the twenty-­first century, we can see that poverty is the direct result of state policies, and that those policies are a choice made by powerful elite groups, whose very wealth leaves them untouched by the economic decisions they make. Such elite groups include the politicians responsible for austerity measures, but also international financial ‘leaders’ who, in 2007 to 2008, were exposed as indulging in the kind of rampant corporate greed that would not be out of place in the pages of Almanac. For example, the ‘choice’ made by Goldman Sachs to gamble on global food prices for profit resulted in the widespread starvation of millions worldwide. As I have argued elsewhere, this ‘choice’ was made, as Jonathan Hari has noted, ‘by some of the richest people in the world [and]’ caused the ‘malnutrition or starvation’ of two hundred million people . . . ‘riots in thirty countries’, and the violent overthrow of ‘at least one government’ (Tillett 2013: 20). As we see here, what appears to be a simple ‘choice’ or policy has profoundly far-­reaching human and natural effects that demonstrate an absolute denial of any notion of obligation or relatedness. Indeed, the ‘choice’ by Goldman Sachs has been identified by the

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UN as ‘silent mass murder’ (Hari 2010). And one of the most highly visible examples was the notorious and indefensible decision in 2008, in the midst of the worst global financial crisis in living memory, to ‘reward’ the already wealthy bankers responsible with financial ‘bonuses’. Condemned by President Obama as ‘shameful’ and evidence of a lack of ‘restraint’, ‘discipline’ and social ‘responsibility’, the international furore caused by bankers’ bonuses pointed to the many millions worldwide who were struggling to survive and to the equal numbers who were starving and dying (Seib 2009). Again, the bankers’ bonuses scandal could easily have come from the pages of Almanac, as it exposed not only the absolute disconnect of the powerful elites that Almanac demonstrates, but also the ways in which both poverty and wealth are deliberately manufactured. What is crucial to a twenty-­first-century reading of these extra-­ textual global events is a recognition of the sheer numbers of people affected. These numbers meant that, as ‘unfair and unethical debt transfer from the very richest to the very poorest’ began to be publicly recognized by 2010, there were the beginnings of a ‘popular [international] backlash’ to protest inequality and demand greater democracy (Tillett 2013: 21). Much like Almanac’s ‘multiple, contradictory, and equally possible versions’ of resistance, these twenty-­firstcentury extra-­textual forms of resistance offered a range of responses from peaceful protest, to occupation, to political and social negotiations, to armed revolt. But whatever the form, it has become clear in the twenty-­first century that we can no longer dismiss Almanac’s warnings of popular resistance and Revolucíon as ‘airy nothing’. This chapter argues that we can very productively re-­read Silko’s novel through a retrospective consideration of more recent global forms of popular resistance. In this context, I will here briefly consider one significant form of mass resistance, the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010, as an introduction to the kinds of popular insurgence that have begun to emerge in the last decade and their relationships to Almanac’s textual cosmopolitics. Sparked by the self-­immolation of a Tunisian street-­trader, Mohamed Bouazizi, in December 2010, protesting police corruption, the Arab Spring erupted in widespread protests not only in Tunisia, where the president was forced to flee the country, but across the Arab world, where the protestors were driven by a range of varied and variable factors including – as in Almanac – the desire for greater democracy and a fairer society. Unrest spread quickly from Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, and also affected Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco and Sudan; and this popular unrest resulted in the overthrow of the Tunisian, Egyptian and Kuwaiti presidents, the sacking of four governments in Jordan, the introduction of democratic elections in Yemen in 2012, and the introduction of new candidates for elections in Sudan and Iraq. Most significantly, the Arab Spring saw the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s thirty-­four-year-­long dictatorship in Libya in 2011, and his subsequent execution. As A. Murat Agdemir has noted, the Arab Spring ‘caused the biggest transformation of the Middle East since decolonization’ where ‘Arabs in different countries’ were nonetheless united as they ‘took to the

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streets demanding freedom and basic human rights’ (2016: 223). The Arab Spring was, obviously, a very specific case, emerging in countries that often have poor human rights records and few democratic processes, and many protests were violently crushed and ultimately failed in their bids to force social and political change. However, it is nonetheless clear that, as Matthew Partridge has argued, ‘the economic policies of a corrupt elite caused the Arab Spring’ and so are ‘an important driving force behind the demands for political change’ (2011). In this context, there are notable connections between the Arab Spring and the established global anti-­capitalist protest movement. Even more significantly, the Arab Spring marked a new ‘turn’ in popular resistance due to the intense international media and popular interest it created, in an era that had previously condemned most forms of popular resistance. The Arab Spring is thus an example of popular collective resistance that, via its ability to attract positive media coverage, proved to be globally inspirational. Acting to reinvigorate international interest in popular protest, the Arab Spring is important as an extra-­textual context for a retrospective twenty-­first-century reading of Almanac. While the inspirational nature of the Arab Spring derived from the visibility of its popular resistance, it also derived from the easily accessible technologies by which the resisters organized. In this context, the Arab Spring was, as Gadi Wolfsfeld, Elad Segev and Tamir Sheafer have argued, a fascinating example of ‘the role that social media plays in the ability of challengers to mobilize for collective action’, and the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter allowed a powerful form of social networking. Those participating in the Arab Spring unrest were thus able to access ‘powerful, speedy, and relatively low-­cost tools for recruitment, fund-­raising, the distribution of information and images, collective discussions, and mobilization for action’ (2013: 115, 117). The controversial role of social media in this context has been fascinating: while ‘cyber-­enthusiasts express optimism about the ability of the new media to empower people living in nondemocratic societies and to allow insurgents to adopt new strategies’, it is notable that ‘cyber-­skeptics downplay the significance of the new technology, arguing that using the Internet gives people a false sense of participation and keeps them from actual physical protesting’ (Wolfsfeld et al. 2013: 117). However, although Wolfsfeld et al. quite rightly point to the dangers of ‘overemphasiz[ing] the centrality of social media in protest’, my argument here is not concerned with whether social media played a key role, but with the possibilities that social networking media offers as an inspiration for resistance, and as an accessible space through which that inspiration could be disseminated and enacted (2013: 117). Accordingly, the two subsequent sections of this chapter explore the kinds of inspiration upon which Almanac’s two armies draw, and how those forms of inspiration are disseminated, both as a recruiting tool and as an alternative to the dominant patriarchal capitalist narratives. To return briefly to T. V. Reed’s words which act an as epigraph to this final chapter, while the next two sections explore the inevitability of Revolucíon in Almanac, they also explore how

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‘the revolutionary forces will be a rainbow’ (2009: 37); or, how the kinds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborative coalition debated in the meeting in Room 1212 might practically work. The first section considers the ways in which the violent controls of academic discourses such as history are challenged, overturned and rejected by the alternative narratives produced by key representatives of Almanac’s two textual armies. Here, my analyses explore the ways in which narratives of resistance are formulated and disseminated. In the context of the Army of the Homeless, this occurs through Roy’s mapping of resources, and Clinton’s alternative histories of black experiences in the Americas and their planned radio dissemination; while, in the context of the Army of the Poor, this occurs through Angelita’s alternative cataloguing of Indigenous histories of the Americas, along with the trial of the Cuban Marxist Bartolomeo for ‘crimes against tribal histories’ (1991: 525). My argument here also considers how inspiration works in terms of resistance narratives. The final section of this chapter considers Almanac’s construction of resistance, its aims, and its possibilities within the context of specific twenty-­first-century extra-­textual forms of reinvigorated popular resistance that have emerged since the Arab Spring, to think through how and why widely divergent peoples come together to identify and fight a common cause. This final section assesses the notion of obligation as the driving force of ‘Revolucíon’ in Almanac in the context of the 2011 international Occupy movement and the Indigenous Idle No More movement (2012–), which draws on the earlier (1994–) Zapatista movement.

Disseminating narratives of resistance If we were in any doubt as to the significance and power of popular protest in the early twenty-­first century, we only need to look at the ways that, since 9/11, global anti-­capitalist protest of all kinds has been demonized by its identification as ‘terrorist’. For instance, after the 2001 Genoa anti-­capitalist protests, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made what ‘Notes From Nowhere’ has identified as ‘opportunis[tic]’ and ‘cynical’ assertions to equate popular anti-­ capitalist protests with Al Qaeda, and to state unequivocally that both were the ‘enemies of western civilization’ (2003: 501). In its reading of this, ‘Notes From Nowhere’ concludes that American, and subsequently global, declarations of a ‘war on terror’ were/are in reality also ‘a crackdown on domestic dissent’ (2003: 502). This is particularly interesting for a twenty-­first-century reading of Almanac, in large part because of the volume of ‘domestic’ dissent on view in the text, perhaps most evident in the two textual armies. Like the textual almanac itself, both armies demonstrate their commitment to the inclusion of all silenced and absented narratives, and so both recognize the power of state-­ authorized narratives, of the ways in which authorized history imposes an intellectual violence that refuses to allow any alternative narrative which might offer hope to those it keeps oppressed. Both armies, therefore, recognize that a

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successful challenge to the systemic authority requires the retrieval and dissemination of equally powerful alternative cosmopolitical narratives. Two key moments in the text are the production of authoritative ‘resistance narratives’ by both armies, which uncover and expose wider histories and so act as forms of inspiration to those oppressed by the violent controls of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy. The popular knowledge of these silenced and erased histories is essential: in ways that are similar to the extra-­textual inspiration provided by the Arab Spring, which allowed oppressed peoples globally to hope and believe that they too could achieve successful resistance, the recovery and dissemination of silenced and erased textual histories in Almanac inspires acts of resistance. While Clinton notes that ‘[i]f the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up’, his words can also be read within Almanac’s narratives of inevitability: once people know the full history of their unjust oppression, they will rise up (1991: 431, emphasis added). As its name suggests, the American Army of the Homeless is comprised of what Almanac’s vampire capitalists and homosocial patriarchs define as the ‘debris’ of human society. This categorization and hierarchization of human beings both reflects the deeply damaging and divisive ‘authority’ of Linnaean taxonomies, and extends them to their logical conclusion. Almanac’s textual oppressions thus reflect the growing extra-­textual oppressions of the 1980s which, as I discussed in Chapter  2, saw a popular and legislative prejudicial backlash against rights of all kinds in the form of the Reagan era’s ‘culture wars’. And, for twenty-­first-century readers, the ideologies of Almanac’s textual oppressions can also be detected in the imposed and manufactured ‘poverty’ of the majority of the world’s populations, in the domination of the world’s non-­ human populations, and in the degradation of the Earth itself. Ideological oppression can be detected within the very term ‘homeless’, which, while it seems to simply denote someone without a home who is forced to ‘live on the streets’ or to ‘live rough’, nonetheless enacts violently oppressive ideological forms of discrimination. To be homeless is, therefore, also to be ‘without regular work’, to be a ‘drifter’, a ‘vagrant’ who ‘lives by begging’, a ‘derelict’, a ‘vagabond’, or – a term that has profoundly prejudicial connotations in the early twenty-­first century – a ‘migrant’. Via ideologically informed terms that enforce prejudicial forms of categorization, our understanding of homelessness is encouraged to slip very quickly from an awareness of poverty and, importantly, the causes of poverty, as we are instead encouraged to categorize the homeless as deserving of their poverty, and as undeserving of our ‘charity’. In this way, those unfortunate enough to be homeless are redefined, both textually and extra-­textually, as ‘human debris’; and, conveniently, this redefinition removes any need for obligation. The Army of the Homeless demonstrates the volume and range of America’s non-Indigenous poor. In its focus on the Euro-American Roy and the black Indian Clinton as Vietnam veterans, Almanac draws on the popularity of the Rambo film franchise in the 1980s, noting the brutal irony of the fact that, while

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America was happy to accept a cinematic version of the Vietnam veteran, large numbers of real Vietnam and other military veterans were suffering from PTSD and had been offered little or no support, with many ultimately becoming homeless. As Tessa Stuart has commented, according to the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans in 2015, ‘more than a third of homeless individuals across the country are veterans’, and ‘the number of homeless Vietnam veterans . . . is greater than the number of soldiers who died during the war’ (2015). And this is a particular problem in Arizona which, as Fernanda Santos has noted, ‘has more homeless veterans than most other states – roughly one in five homeless adults’ (2014). Retrospectively considering Roy’s comment that ‘Americans got paralyzed with fear every time they saw a Vietnam veteran still wearing combat clothes’, we can thus understand that this fear derives at least in part from a popular awareness of mistreatment: that the veterans ‘had fought and suffered for the US, but the US had no place for them’ (1991: 395). What paralyses Americans with fear is, of course, the danger that the Vietnam veterans represent: they have the military training to effectively resist their appalling treatment should they choose to do so; and Roy points out that, to reassure terrified Americans, all he has to do is to assert that ‘the past was history and no longer mattered’ (1991: 390). Both Roy and Clinton therefore deliberately engage with the importance of these elided histories of oppression, and with the resistance that can be effectively offered by those with the right knowledge and training. In this context, the Army of the Homeless seeks justice, and it is no coincidence that the Army is eventually also identified by Clinton as the ‘Army of Justice’. Moreover, the Army of the Homeless seeks nothing less than the re-­ enactment of democracy itself: as Roy comments, a country that allows ‘women and children to go hungry and slee[p] on the streets’ and the police to ‘bea[t] homeless old men’ is ‘not [a] democracy’ and ‘[s]omething had to be done’ (1991: 393, emphasis added). Importantly, resistance is here offered on behalf of all of the poor and especially those who are unable to protect themselves, and so we see an enactment of the principles of relatedness as, via the resistance narratives of the Army of the Homeless, Almanac’s textual world is reoriented by the poor themselves to situate obligation at its centre. Both Roy and Clinton produce written narratives of resistance. Identifying those ‘who were incensed, who were outraged’, Roy’s desire to ‘lead them against injustice’ becomes a key part of his resistance narrative (1991: 399, 400). In this context, Roy produces a map of local ‘locations of resources’ that will be essential to the Army’s successful operation and for the successful ‘redistribution’ of some of America’s wealth (1991: 401). At its simplest level, this redistribution is the occupation of empty ‘Tucson vacation homes’, a recognition of the obscenity of allowing homes to sit vacant when vast numbers of those living in poverty are homeless (1991: 408). Yet Almanac’s readers begin to see that redistribution is also far more complex, that redistribution is a requirement in order for obligations to the poor to be met, so that ‘democracy’ can be ‘reclaim[ed] . . . from corruption at all levels’ (1991: 410). Roy’s resistance narrative is

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accompanied by Clinton’s ‘liberation broadcasts’ (1991: 426). Taken on as a second leader by Roy, it is Clinton’s ‘sense of outrage’ that is ‘important’ to Roy, his understanding of the ways in which authorized histories have created and enforced the oppression of the majority, and his firm belief in traditional African tribal practices that ‘shared food and wealth in common’ and so recognized and acted upon their obligations (1991: 404, 408). Clinton’s redefinition of the ‘Army of Justice’ shows not just a shift towards narratives that might achieve justice, but also a linking together of justice with obligation, a sense that meeting our obligations is itself an enactment of justice. While the majority of Almanac’s oppressed peoples harbour ‘resentment’ that the treatment they receive is unjust, there is also a widespread, unspoken and ‘secret’ acceptance of their place at ‘the bottom of the barrel’ (1991: 394). To make the people ‘rise up’, what is required is a narrative that will challenge this absolute, unconditional belief that ‘they deserved the bottom’ and instead inspire the outrage and hope required for effective resistance (1991: 394). Clinton’s ‘liberation broadcasts’ are designed in this context, so that the ‘ordinary [American] citizens’ will respond to his ‘call to war’ (1991: 410). Clinton’s drawing together of African and Indigenous American spiritual beliefs through the histories and routes of slavery exposes the ‘older and deeper [cosmopolitical] connection between Africa and the Americas’, and demonstrates the ways in which African slaves and Indigenous tribal peoples have common links via shared experiences of oppression: how ‘[t]he United States still owed African-Americans just as the U.S. still owed Native Americans’ (1991: 416, 427). Importantly, Clinton demonstrates the ways in which the cosmopolitical narratives of African slaves and Indigenous tribal peoples were deployed in very similar ways to sustain cultural identity, embody hope, and offer resistance. Clinton’s recovered histories point to the Caribbean experiences of ‘black Indians’ of mixed heritage and spiritual traditions, where ‘great American and great African tribal cultures had come together to create a powerful consciousness’ (1991: 416). Importantly, those cosmopolitical historical narratives translate directly into contemporary political and economic aid: the African representative at the meeting in Room 1212 at the International Holistic Healers’ Convention is adamant that ‘[n]ow that black Africans had finally recovered their ancestral land the spirits would not allow the Africans to turn their backs on the tribes of the Americas as they fought to take back their land’ (1991: 742). Clinton’s radio broadcasts are narratives of ‘liberation’: they are not only acts which ‘set free’ from ‘imprisonment’, from ‘slavery’, from ‘oppression’, they are equally acts which ‘release’ us from ‘limiting forms of thought or behaviour’. As T. V. Reed has commented, Almanac makes it clear that ‘only by telling history properly – only by honoring the ancestors by telling past events from their perspective – can one think and act rationally in the contemporary world’ (2009: 27). In this context, ‘truthful storytelling’ is ‘the antidote’ to Almanac’s diseased and oppressive worlds, and the past is of crucial importance (Reed 2009: 27–8).

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Clinton’s broadcasts thus bring together diverse historical moments of successful resistance – a catalogue of erased moments of racial resistance in the United States and Caribbean from 1526 to 1862, and the roles played by African spiritual practices in acts of resistance – to offer narratives of hope to those currently oppressed. Indeed, these connections demonstrate that the history of slavery is far more pervasive than the authorized narratives allow. In his reading of the pre-­history of racialized chattel slavery, Clinton looks, much like Beaufrey and Serlo, back to the practices of the wealthy elites of Europe, yet Clinton’s re-­ reading of the legacies of those histories provides a very different picture of Almanac’s textual death-­worlds. Making links between classical slavery, serfdom, racialized chattel slavery, and the extreme poverty of the late twentieth century, Clinton’s reading offers a direct challenge to Beaufrey’s and Serlo’s imposed narratives of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy to assert that ‘[m]ost people were not free’, especially when ‘so-­called “free” men, women, and children slept under cardboard on the street’ (1991: 412). And this equation offers disturbing ways in which we can read and re-­read the imposition of manufactured extra-­textual poverty in the twenty-­first century. The resistance narratives of the South American Indigenous Army of the Poor offer a response to General J.’s recommendations for their ‘quick’ and invisible ‘annihilation’ (1991: 495). Led by Angelita La Escapía, inspired by a reimagined and indigenized Marx, and fed by the cosmopolitical prophecies and visions of the twins Tacho/Wacah and El Feo, the Army of the Poor contains multiple voices and perspectives that offer multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of resistance. While Tacho argues that ‘the spirits would protect them’, El Feo finds himself agreeing with Angelita that ‘the unarmed people would most likely be shot down’ (1991: 711). Indeed, although both Tacho and El Feo believe absolutely that it ‘might require a hundred years’ but the ‘tribal people would retake the Americas’, Angelita is far more sceptical of ‘spiritual change . . . tak[ing] place overnight’, preferring instead to rely on acquiring the weapons with which she can ‘protect’ the people ‘from air attacks’ (1991: 712). Despite this seeming contradiction in the forms of resistance, all participants agree that the enactment of resistance is central to the concerns of the Army of the Poor. Like the Army of the Homeless/Justice north of the Mexican border, the Army of the Poor undergoes two subsequent name changes that linguistically and ideologically attest to its evolving motivations and objectives. While the Army of the Poor is transformed into the Army of Justice and Retribution, it also becomes the Army of Justice and Redistribution. While both new names draw attention to the role of justice, it is notable that the former exposes an understanding of justice as an act of ‘vengeance’ or ‘punishment’, while the latter comments quite specifically on the human social, economic and political justice that lies in the creation of greater equality via imposed and enforced socio-­ political and cosmopolitical change, or Revolucíon. It is via Angelita that Almanac’s readers are given an alternative resistance narrative who, like Clinton, traces and exposes important elided and silenced

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Indigenous histories to inspire both outrage and hope. Like Wilson Weasel Tail, Angelita understands that history is also memory, acknowledging that ‘in the stories, the people lived on in the imaginations and hearts of their descendants. Whenever their stories were told, the spirits of the ancestors were present and their power was alive’ (1991: 520). For the Indigenous Army of Justice and Retribution/Redistribution, these histories are ‘sacred, the source of their entire existence’, and Angelita shows that it is through repetition, through continual re-­telling, that these resistance narratives ‘accumulated momentum and power’ and eventually become ‘unstoppable’ (1991: 315, 520, 523). As I have argued elsewhere, memory and history in Almanac are connected directly to political action as ‘the past must be actively remembered if we are to secure the future’ (2007b: 33). And so, to ‘ensure that the people receive the justice they have been denied’, it is notable that Angelita strives ‘to release the “relentless forces” of history through political action’ (Tillett 2007b: 34). Here, Angelita’s understanding of the political power of history, that ‘[h]istory was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force’, is the driving force behind her compilation of alternative Indigenous histories as a narrative of resistance (1991: 316). Angelita’s cosmopolitical narrative is thus deployed as a means by which the ‘crimes’ of Euro-American academic history as a discipline can be exposed and explored via the character Bartolomeo. Put on trial for ‘crimes against tribal history’, Bartolomeo is also on trial as a representative of European and American colonialism: ‘this was a trial of all Europeans. More than five hundred years of white men in Indian jurisdiction were on trial with Bartolomeo’ (1991: 315, 526). Bartolomeo’s actions must be interpreted within Almanac’s wider narratives of resistance, and readers are encouraged to trace the ideological assault on tribal cultural identity that is evident in his assertion that ‘Jungle monkeys and savages have no history’, and the erasure of tribal presence evident in his firm belief that ‘before Fidel, history did not exist’ in the Americas (1991: 525, 315). Bartolomeo’s refusal to accept the authority of the tribal court not only challenges Indigenous sovereignty, but also attempts to erase both Indigenous presence and the historical acts of genocide and abuse that are inscribed within Indigenous histories. Indeed, his continued denial of tribal histories is ‘a denial of the historical “evidence” read to the court by Angelita’ (Tillett 2007b: 35). Angelita’s narrative of resistance demonstrates her firm belief that ‘the most complete history was the most powerful force’ and acts, like Clinton’s, to reiterate Almanac’s cosmopolitical understanding that knowledge can not only offer hope, but also inspire the outrage required for resistance and Revolucíon. Like Clinton’s liberation broadcasts, Angelita’s historical list is composed of acts of resistance. Covering ‘only a few of the big uprisings and revolutions’, Angelita’s list runs from 1510 to 1945 to cover the Americas continentally, connecting together the experiences and the interests of Indigenous and other oppressed groups across the continent. Angelita’s list thus is designed to inspire both hope and outrage for the Indigenous ‘village people’ who ‘were not in the

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habit of looking at the “bigger picture” ’ (1991: 530). Significantly, this is a bigger picture that, like Clinton’s liberation broadcasts, traces the links between the experiences of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and makes connections between the oppressive experiences of the Indigenous Army of Justice and Retribution/Redistribution and the Army of the Homeless/ Justice. Angelita’s narrative causes a ‘great deal of excitement’, and the ‘fuller’ history inspires the audience to begin to add their own knowledge of more local related acts of resistance (1991: 530). As Angelita’s ‘recitation of rebellions’ acts to ‘radiat[e] energy to the people gathered’, their newly extended understanding of the power of their histories ensures that they appreciate the full nature of Bartolomeo’s crimes. Bartolomeo’s execution for crimes against tribal history therefore shows that a denial and an erasure of history is also a denial of the ‘lives . . . sufferings and . . . deaths’ of millions of oppressed historical and contemporary peoples (Tillett 2007b: 35). Angelita’s final address links the histories of Indigenous resistance directly to Indigenous cosmopolitics to show that the ‘dispossessed people of the earth [will] . . . rise up and take back [the] lands that . . . [are] their birthright’, that ‘would never again be held as private property, but as lands belonging to the people forever to protect’ (1991: 532). At the centre of Angelita’s narrative of resistance, then, is a clear cosmopolitical understanding of grounded normativity, of the relatedness of humans to all of their non-­human kin, and of the fundamental importance of recognizing and meeting our obligations.

Twenty-­first-century contexts Both of Almanac’s armies show us how inspiration works in terms of resistance narratives, and my final arguments here consider the concerns raised by textual characters at the meeting in Room 1212 during the International Holistic Healers’ Convention, to think through how and why widely divergent peoples come together to identify and fight a common cause. While characters such as Calabazas exhibit real concern that there is no common cause that will overcome some of the more powerful lines that divide us, such as race, it is significant that a variety of important resistance leaders insist that far more connects the oppressed than divides them. Here, the Barefoot Hopi, Tacho, El Feo and Clinton all argue in favour of a cross-­cultural coalition that is predicated, as I discussed in the last chapter, on a ‘disappearance of all things European’ that will be achieved via the embracing of Indigenous cosmopolitics and the rejection of the damagingly separatist ideologies of patriarchal capitalism. To Clinton’s mind, ‘[n]othing could be black only or brown only or white anymore’ if popular resistance is to turn successfully to Revolucíon; and this successful insurrection can only be effected through diverse oppressed peoples ‘work[ing] together as common force’ (1991: 747). Crucially, this point extends beyond the textual to engage with the extra-­textual. Channette Romero

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has argued that Almanac ‘attempts to bring about the change in consciousness it discusses by fostering cross-­cultural resistance networks dedicated to social justice’ (2002: 638, emphasis added). In a twenty-­first-century reading, on the back of the inspirational popular resistances of the Arab Spring, of Occupy and of Idle No More, it is increasingly evident that the kinds of cross-­cultural resistance networks that Almanac discusses are indeed emerging. As Sandy Grande has noted, ‘the infiltration of the neoliberal state into the deepest recesses of our personal and political lives has reached such unsustainable proportions that it has incited global resistance’, with the result that ‘[t]he past ten years have ushered in extraordinary change’ (2013: xvi–xvii, 1). Accordingly, it seems fitting for a twenty-­first-century reading to close here with a consideration of Almanac’s construction of resistance and revolucíon within the context of two of these emergent twenty-­first-century resistance movements which, like the Arab Spring, have made extensive and highly successful use of social media. In this final section, I therefore consider the 2011 International Occupy movement and the 2012 Idle No More movement, along with a brief consideration of the 1994 Zapatista movement, to think through the ways in which widely divergent peoples come together to identify and fight a common cause, including the role that is played by obligation in these extra-­textual examples. It is no coincidence that the Occupy movement emerged in 2011 less than a year after the Arab Spring, especially as both had economic and democratic concerns at their very heart. Emerging from the same roots as the anti-­ globalization movement, and eventually becoming part of the global justice movement, the first protest to attract popular attention was Occupy Wall Street in September 2011. Interviewed at the site of the Occupy protest, Cornel West identified the protest as ‘a democratic process’ and a ‘non-­violent process’, but asserted that it was nonetheless ‘a revolution’ because it strove for ‘a transfer of power from oligarchs to everyday people of all colors’ (2011). Like the epistemological and paradigmatic changes demanded in Almanac, West argued that the original Occupy protest aimed for ‘a democratic awakening’ via the ‘raising [of] political consciousness . . . so people can begin to see what’s going on through a different set of lens’ (2011). Moreover, for West, Occupy Wall Street was ‘a U.S. Autumn responding to the Arab Spring’ (2011). Within a few months, Occupy Wall Street had transformed from a single protest into a global movement; in terms very similar to those within Almanac, Occupy had, Esther Addley noted, metamorphosed ‘from a relatively modest demonstration in New York . . . into a truly global howl of protest’ as, less than a month later, related protests were being hosted in more than nine hundred cities worldwide (2011). And, according to the official Occupy Wall Street website, Occupy’s ‘people-­ powered movement’ has, by 2017, been embraced in ‘over 100 cities in the United States’ and the movement has sparked protests ‘in over 1,500 cities globally’.3 Importantly, the Occupy movement had its roots in the 2011 Spanish anti-­austerity Indignados or ‘Outraged’ movement, whose very terminology

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deployed the kinds of terms and sentiments that resonate with the concerns of Silko’s text. However, the international impact of Occupy New York was, in large part, due to the power and resonance of its slogans which, in the name of the globally oppressed, asserted that ‘We are the 99 per cent’, while decrying the corporate, political and institutional greed of the ‘1 per cent’. And the concerns of Occupy Wall Street resonate very clearly with some of the concerns of Almanac’s textual armies, especially the significant concept of redistribution: as the original Occupy Tumblr site announced, ‘We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything’ (Penny 2011). Pointing to the protesters’ placards stating that ‘the wealthiest 400 Americans have more combined wealth than the poorest 150 million’, Laurie Penny argued that the Occupy slogan was in reality ‘a very polite way of saying class war’ (2011). Importantly, Manuel Castells has identified Occupy as a ‘network . . . of outrage and hope’, and this suggestion resonates with the interests of both of Almanac’s textual armies. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘Occupy embraced participatory politics, recognized no organized hierarchical structure, and encouraged all members to both speak and listen’ (2013: 22). In the context of Almanac’s emphasis upon justice within resistance and Revolucíon, it is notable that Occupy foregrounded the use of ‘the people’s microphone’ by which a single voice and sentiment could be transformed into a ‘mass sound of protest’ to emphasize ‘solidarity . . . communal vision, and commitment’ (Tillett 2013: 22). Emerging initially as a practical solution to official refusals to permit the group to use sound amplification in a public space, Occupy’s use of ‘the people’s microphone’ – where the words of the speaker are repeated by all within earshot, often in several radiating ‘waves’ until everyone has heard them – has become, according to Hannah Chadeayne Appel, ‘a tool of radical equalization’ (2011). In this context, it is notable that the terminology of the Occupy movement can be retrospectively read within the context of Roy’s map of resources, within the physical ‘occupation’ that redistributed empty property to those most in need, and so translated ‘property’ into ‘homes’. In addition, Occupy has been significant for the kind of democratic processes it advocated. Embracing participatory politics, Occupy’s demand for ‘real democracy’ meant a rejection of the kinds of ‘vertical power’ imposed by the elite 1 per cent and an embracing of ‘horizontal power’; and this put the emphasis, as Sarah van Gelder has noted, on ‘general assemblies, where decisions are made by consensus’ (2011: 8). In short, what drove Occupy and what made it so attractive to so many worldwide, was its sense of obligation; its understanding that what wasn’t working with capitalism was its absolute lack of any sense of responsibility or obligation. In 2017, it is evident that, whatever its shortcomings, Occupy did mark a specific moment at which vast numbers of world’s populations who comprised the 99 per cent

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could see that ‘this changes everything’ (van Gelder 2011). While Occupy is in 2017, as Amber Jamieson wrote at a Wall Street ‘reunion’, now ‘splintered and largely absent from the political arena’, it is notable that its legacy lives on in the mainstream as Occupy policies became ‘central issues of the 2016 presidential campaign’ (2016). In this context, Occupy’s significance is that it ‘helped create a protest environment that has allowed other political movements . . . to flourish’ (Jamieson 2016). It should be noted, however, that what led Occupy to splinter, what led some of its activists to look elsewhere for the kind of inclusivity they desired, was Occupy’s own inability to fully negotiate some of the problems of cross-­cultural coalitions that Calabazas warns of in Silko’s novel. Occupy was, for instance, largely middle class and white, offering little representation for other cultural, ethnic or racial groups; and it is notable that many former Occupy activists have been attracted by subsequent protest groups such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More that are organized around a central awareness of racialized concerns and ‘responded to problematic gaps and fissures in Occupy’s claims of inclusivity’ (Tillett 2013: 22). For instance, Occupy’s deployment of colonial/imperialist language, the colonial/imperialist aspirations embedded with the very term ‘occupy’, were exacerbated by Occupy Wall Street’s seeming lack of awareness that the site they occupied – and, of course, the United States as a national space – was Indigenous land that was already ‘occupied’. As Indian Country Today noted in 2011, soon after the Occupy Wall Street protests began, ‘[w]hile many people in Indian Country can sympathize with the protestors’ claims’, the lack of recognition of occupied Indigenous land had led Indigenous groups to point to the need to ‘Decolonize Wall Street’ (2011). In this context, Occupy quite clearly fell short ‘of the kinds of intercultural community connections that Almanac advocates, in spite of its firm focus on some of the other important concerns of Silko’s text’ (Tillett 2013: 22). While the economic and political concerns of the Occupy movement clearly resonate with the concerns of Almanac’s multitude of oppressed, it is equally clear that Occupy fails to embrace the kinds of Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives and worldviews that Almanac argues are essential to successful resistance and Revolucíon; to the ‘disappearance of all things European’. However, the kinds of cosmopolitical Revolucíon advocated by Almanac can be detected in the Idle No More movement. Notably, Idle No More has clear relationships to the earlier Zapatista movement, that emerged in 1994 as a protest against the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and upon whose cosmopolitics Silko was clearly drawing in her construction of the Indigenous Army of the Poor.4 As Adamson has commented, ‘Silko was in personal contact with the Zapatistas during the years she was writing her novel’, and so ‘was deeply familiar with th[e] tensions and the history of hemispheric meetings, summits and conferences convened to build leadership capacity and unity among Central and South America[n] indigenous groups in the years before the Zapatista uprising’ (2014: 177–8). Much has

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already been written on the relationship between Silko’s novel and the Zapatista uprising, most notably by Adamson herself,5 and I have myself engaged with the topic elsewhere,6 so I will not repeat those arguments here. Rather my brief analysis of the Zapatistas will serve to feed forwards into a more detailed analysis of how the achievements of the Zapatista movement have paved the way for the emergence of Idle No More, and for a more visible and fundamental narrative of Indigenous cosmopolitics. In the context of Almanac, it is important to note that, although the Zapatistas embraced their Indigenous identity, they nonetheless, as Adamson has argued, ‘refused to call their movement “indigenous” or “ethnic” ’ (2014: 178). In part, this can be interpreted as a recognition of some of the problems identified at Almanac’s meeting in Room 1212, an awareness that Indigenous cosmopolitical understanding tend to be ‘respected as culture’ but dismissed ‘as a viable form of politics’ (Adamson 2012a: 150). But it can also be interpreted as a recognition, much like that expressed in Almanac, that the oppressive treatment ordinarily reserved for Indigenous peoples in the Americas was becoming much more widely applied; that, as Occupy also recognized, 99 per cent of the world’s populations were now deliberately oppressed, and so connected through oppression. As Adamson has noted, it is important for Almanac’s readers to understand that the Zapatista uprising’s declaration ‘¡Todos somos indios!’, which translates roughly as ‘we are all Indian’, should be read not as a declaration of universal indigeneity, but rather as a recognition of the universality of the threat that every human faces from the dangerous systemic ideologies that result in imposed poverty and ecological degradation. As Adamson has noted, ‘when it comes to the threats to life and planet presented by toxins and toxic ideologies, ‘¡Todos somos indios!’ (2012c: 18). More than twenty years on, the Zapatista movement continues to resist the same kinds of dangerous systemic globalizing capitalist and patriarchal forces depicted within Silko’s novel. Indeed, the Zapatistas will be entering mainstream Mexican politics in 2018, through their support of the first Indigenous female presidential candidate. However, with the radical changes in popular consciousness that we have seen since 2011, it has become clear that Almanac’s cosmopolitics are more clearly resonant with the Indigenous Idle No More movement, who have benefitted directly from the global popular awareness of Indigenous resistance successfully created by the Zapatistas. Emerging in 2012 as a response to planned legislation by the Canadian government that would impact upon First Nations treaties and sovereignty and upon the environment, Idle No More is significant as a female-­led resistance movement with international impact. In 2013, its four female founders and leaders, Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson and Sheelah McLean, were named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of ‘100 Leading Global Thinkers’.7 This act threw international emphasis upon the ‘spiritual power’ of the movement’s Indigenous philosophies, and upon the ‘political power of its communal “solutions” to global questions of environmental and social justice’ (Tillett 2013:

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23). This recognition of Idle No More’s founders is crucial in the context of Almanac’s dangerously imbalanced patriarchal structures: not only is it ‘unusual for four women to make a list of globally influential political and philosophical thinkers’, but this offers hope that ‘a greater acceptance of indigenous philosophy might also include greater acceptance of female philosophies and ways of thinking’ (Tillett 2013: 23). Idle No More snowballed from a series of email communications, via Twitter and a local Facebook page, to national and then international forms of resistance. Drawing on ‘grassroots tactics’, Idle No More’s aims resonate with earlier Zapatista strategies: as one of the founders, Nina Wilson, commented, ‘We are trying to help people get their voices back so that we can make more change and we are able to have more of a First Nations voice . . . not just a First Nations, but an Indigenous voice, and not just an Indigenous voice but a grassroots voice, because it affects us all’ (Caven 2013). And here Almanac’s twenty-­first-century readers can also see echoes of the inclusive and expansive sentiments expressed by Clinton, that the cosmopolitical narratives of resistance are for ‘all people’ because ‘[a]ll were welcome – everyone had been included’ (1991: 416). In its mission statements, Idle No More very carefully outlines the rationale and benefits of an inclusive approach: refusing to ‘separate capitalism from environmental degradation’, the movement calls ‘on all people’ to ‘join in a peaceful revolution to honor Indigenous sovereignty and to protect the land and water’.8 Although Idle No More foregrounds Indigenous rights, there is, as I have argued elsewhere, a commitment to the ‘inclusion of wider communities that reflects the interconnectedness evident in Almanac’ (2013: 23). And this is evident within the founding structures of the movement itself, where three of the founding members are Indigenous and one is nonIndigenous. As Idle No More events continue to spread nationally, continentally and globally, it is fascinating to consider the ways in which this widening acceptance of Indigenous cosmopolitical values can be read within the context of Almanac’s ‘disappearance of all things European’. Idle No More has, interestingly, been attracting a range of committed nonIndigenous political activists: as Sarah Boesveld has commented, former Occupy protesters and environmental activists are ‘finding inspiration in Idle No More’ primarily because ‘Idle No More has deep historical ties when Occupy did not, a collective theme to rally around while Occupy did not, and the potential to carry . . . causes into the future’ (2013). Read retrospectively within the context of Almanac, these ties are, of course, cosmopolitical, and this is evident in Idle No More’s statements that recognize the dangers of unsustainable lifestyles and paradigms, instead arguing for ‘healthy, just, equitable and sustainable communities’. As the twins Tacho/Wacah and El Feo state, ‘All were welcome. It was only necessary to walk with the people and let go of all the greed and the selfishness in one’s heart. One must be able to let go of a great many comforts and all things European; but the reward would be peace and harmony with all living things. All they had to do was return to Mother Earth. No more blasting, digging, or burning’ (1991: 710). While this might sound

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overtly simplistic, when read in the context of subsequent extra-­textual Indigenous resistance movements such as the Zapatistas and Idle No More, it is clear that this kind of cosmopolitical transformation must be combined with the kinds of direct political action advocated by Angelita, Clinton, Zecha and Roy. And so, alongside an extension of the cosmopolitical narrative that Almanac advocates, there is, as Glenn Scott Coulthard has noted in his analysis of the Idle No More movement, also the ‘necessity of direct action’, the necessity of the understanding that we can have ‘capitalism, no more!’, the necessity of recognizing that ‘indigenous sovereignty’ also includes ‘the city’, the necessity of ‘decoloniz[ing]’ patriarchal attitudes that prevent ‘gender justice’, and the necessity of recognizing that Idle No More’s impact and reach can and must go ‘beyond the nation state’ (2014: 165, 170, 173, 176, 178). This final point also, importantly, offers both hope and inspiration; and both are evident in Idle No More’s public assertion that it has ‘a vision and a plan of how to build’ the kinds of ‘healthy, just, equitable and sustainable communities’ that are required globally in the twenty-­first century.9 But perhaps the greatest hope and inspiration derives from Idle No More’s embracing and deployment of obligation, which is at the heart of the movement’s strategies for sustainable communities. This is crucial in the context of Almanac’s apocalyptic warnings about the need for the widespread embracing of Indigenous cosmopolitical understandings of our world. Thinking back to Almanac’s original hostile reception that blatantly dismissed its warnings of disaster and its demands for Revolucíon from a twenty-­first-century vantage point, it is profoundly significant that internationally influential environmental activists such as Bill McKibben have argued that the committed cosmopolitical activism of Idle No More ‘could be our last hope as a species’ (Boesveld 2013).

Notes 1 T. V. Reed, ’Toxic Colonialism, Environmental Justice, and Native Resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead’ (MELUS 34, 2, 2009), 37. 2 See, for instance, Joni Adamson’s discussion of Greg Garrard’s 2004 analysis of Almanac (2013). 3 See the OWS official website at http://occupywallst.org/about/. 4 See the official EZLN website, at http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/. 5 See Adamson (2001), (2012c), and (2013). 6 See Tillett (2008). 7 See http://2013-global-­thinkers.foreignpolicy.com/wilson. 8 See the official website at http://www.idlenomore.ca/. 9 See http://www.idlenomore.ca/.

Chapter 8 A f terword : A nother W orld is P ossi b le

This is no new war. This war has a five-­hundred-year history. This is the same war of resistance that the indigenous people of the Americas have never ceased to fight . . . We are all part of the old stories. Whether we know the stories or not, the stories know about us . . . . . The spirits of the ancestors cry out for justice. Their voices are louder now. The mountains shake and fall; the hurricane winds scour the earth; fire and flood engulf the cities as the ancestor spirits announce the time that will return. Human beings are also natural forces of the earth. There will be no peace in the Americas until there is justice for the earth and her children.1 At the heart of Almanac of the Dead is the Earth. What we see depicted on Almanac’s five-­hundred-year map are the traces, the spaces, the inscriptions of a lengthy ideological and physical war that has been waged against Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and against the natural world and its non-­human inhabitants, by the combined and mutually supportive forces of vampire capitalism and homosocial patriarchy. Yet, as Silko’s comments above illustrate, this is now a war that is being extended against all human beings that threatens our lives and our environments and, ultimately, threatens all planetary life. In 2017, ‘¡Todos somos indios!’ When Almanac was first published, this warning was easier to dismiss. But in 2017, in the wake of rising global awareness and understanding of climate change and its causes, and global popular protest and resistance to patriarchal capitalism, things are no longer quite so clear. As I stated in Chapter 1, the aim of this study is to address lingering reader bewilderment, and provide a path through the dangerous wilderness of Silko’s novel; not only to situate Almanac in the time of its composition, but to expose its continued, indeed its increased, significance for twenty-­first-century readings; to explore the central message that the lives of humans – and the quality of those lives – are inextricable from the life and quality of life of the natural world. While this is increasingly clear in the twenty-­first century, it is an understanding that is also increasingly under

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challenge from powerful elite groups who, in 2017, occupy positions of global power. Yet, with the rise of popular global resistance movements, it seems as if the tide is beginning to turn, and that many of the ‘99 per cent’ are starting to see both the problems of climate change, and the ways in which our cultural attitudes and worldviews are actively creating the environmental and social problems that we increasingly experience. Our deliberate pursuit of profit and destruction regardless of the human or environmental costs should be seen, as Silko comments, as an act of war, as a continuance of the kinds of genocidal warfare directed by Europeans against Indigenous peoples in the settlement of the Americas. Silko’s suggestion that the voices of resistance ‘are louder now’ has even more relevance and resonance in 2017, in the wake of a global witnessing of new international narratives of resistance against the forces of patriarchal capitalism that Almanac so graphically and accurately depicts. When Slavoj Žižek addressed Occupy Wall Street in 2011, he argued that only dreamers ‘think things can go on indefinitely the way they are’, the majority of the world’s human populations are now ‘awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare’ (2011). In 1991, Almanac accurately showed us this dream turned nightmare, and pointed us to one very simple solution: it is ‘only necessary to walk with the people and let go of all the greed and the selfishness in one’s heart’ (1991: 710). In doing so, crucially, we must recognize our responsibilities and obligations, towards other humans, towards non-­human life forms, and towards the Earth itself. In this context, I will conclude by focusing briefly on two of Silko’s snakes: the textual earth formation at Laguna at the close of the novel, and the extra-­textual mural that Silko painted while writing Almanac. Snakes pervade Silko’s novel, from Clinton’s discussion of the creolized African-Haitian ‘great serpent spirit’ Damballah who ‘joins’ the Indigenous American ‘giant plumed serpent’ Quetzalcoatl, to the giant stone serpent that emerged from the tailings of the uranium mine at Laguna in 1979, which Silko interprets within Almanac as a cosmopolitical protest against ‘this desecration. This crime against all living things’ (1991: 424, 429, 35). And equally significant to her own writing process, as I discussed in the first chapter, was Silko’s decision to paint an outdoor mural of a snake as messenger, which bluntly outlined the various forms of resistance offered by Almanac. As Silko reflected several years after publishing Almanac, ‘it wasn’t until . . . I wrote the last sentence of Almanac, that I realized that the giant snake had been a catalyst for the novel from the start’ (1996: 144). Indeed, Silko’s claim, that ‘one might almost say that I had to write this novel in order to figure out for myself the meaning of the giant stone snake that had appeared near the uranium mine [at Laguna] in 1979’, exposes the centrality of the concerns of the Earth to Silko’s novel (1996: 144). Silko’s textual recreation of the Laguna stone serpent narrativized the emergence of the physical stone serpent at the Jackpile uranium mine, and its interpretation by the Laguna as a physical embodiment of ‘the old stories [that] mention a giant snake who is a messenger for the Mother Creator’ (Silko 1996: 126). Here,

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both text and its extra-­textual context foreground Indigenous cosmopolitics in their identification of the stone serpents as Maahastryu, an ancient sacred Laguna serpent deity. Silko’s suggestion, that ‘we might spare ourselves some tragedy by listening to the messages of sand and stone in which the form of the giant snake’ (1996: 132), clearly points to the cosmopolitics at the heart of more recent extra-­textual political developments such as the 2010 Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME). Here, Joni Adamson’s work is invaluable to assessing the ways in Almanac quite literally embodies the cosmopolitical forces that it discusses. Adamson points to the emphasis within UDRME upon the sentience of the Earth, and upon the rights of ‘earth-­beings’ – ‘defined as ecosystems, natural communities, species and all other natural entities which exist as part of Mother Earth’ – to a life that is not impinged upon by invasive or harmful human activity (2012a: 144). In this context, Adamson has argued that ‘Silko’s “case study” of the fictional Maahastryu [in Almanac]’ can be ‘read in the context of real-­world [Indigenous] political organization . . . around sentient Earthbeings’ (2013: 184). Like the damaging twenty-­first-century governmental legislations that we are told are unavoidable but which we are only now beginning to recognize as deliberate ‘choices’, Almanac’s readers are encouraged to see that our refusal to believe in the sentience of the Earth is a choice, and one that can be reversed if we can learn to acknowledge our relatedness to our non-­human environments. In this context, Adamson has noted that ‘the sandstone snake that emerges from uranium tailings in Almanac can be read as a “proposal” to take seriously, even literally, the place of “earth-­beings” in politics and contest scientifically based discourses that claim a singular vision of “Nature” ’ (2014: 184). Almanac’s snakes thus embody the conceptualization of hope in the novel. And they equally embody the cosmopolitical resistance narratives of the text, encouraging us, as Adamson has argued, to engage with ‘the kind of thinking that would enable us to undo, or more accurately, unlearn, a single ontology of politics and thus create possibilities for new interpretations and actions’ (2013: 185–6). Read as a resistance narrative, as an Indigenous cosmopolitical narrative, Almanac is ultimately less bewildering for the twenty-­first-century reader. Above all, in the twenty-­first century, Almanac can be seen as a novel of possibilities; a text that reminds us that there are choices, that another world is indeed possible. And the world that is possible is, to use Coulthard’s terminology, ‘deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms’; a world, therefore, that is founded upon the Indigenous cosmopolitical values of ‘grounded normativity’ (2014: 13, original emphasis). It is in this sense that Almanac demonstrates Arundhati Roy’s suggestion that ‘[a]nother world is not only possible, she is on her way’, where, if we ‘listen

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carefully’, we ‘can hear her breathing’ (2003: 75). As Sterling realizes upon his return home to Laguna, the snake’s ‘message . . . to the people’ is clear: [t]he snake was looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come. (1991: 763)

Note 1 Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 149–51.

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InDEX Academic Council of the United Nations (ACUNS) 81 academic discourse as intellectual violence 105–14 Adamson, J. 8–9, 11, 15, 84–5, 125, 126, 128–9, 144–5, 146, 150, 152, 154, 157–8, 175–6 African Americans 94–5, 109–10, 169–70, 172 AIDS/HIV 96–8 Alaimo, S. 120, 135 Almanac of the Dead (Silko) context 1–12 textual ‘Revolucíons’ 12–22 ‘Alternative Earth modules’ 84–5 Ammons, E. 10, 13–14, 17 anti-capitalism/anti-globalization movements 33–4 Arab Spring 164–5, 173 Army of Justice and Retribution/Army of the Poor 121–2, 133, 170–2 Army of Justice/Army of the Homeless 109, 121–2, 127, 146, 155, 167–8, 168, 169, 172 Arnold, E. 27, 28, 162 Awa Gee (fictional character) 122, 135–7, 140 Balch, O. 143 Barefoot Hopi (fictional character) 140, 155–60 Barnett, L.K. and Thorson, J.L. 6–7 Bartolomeo (fictional character) 110–11, 171, 172 Basso, K.H. 150–1 Beaufrey (fictional character) 33, 36, 40, 46–9, 56, 64–5, 68–9, 70, 72, 73, 78, 98, 99, 101 Bhabba, H.K. 109, 125 biological warfare 97–8 biopower/biopolitics 99–100

Birkerts, S. 6, 13, 161 Blue, Leah (fictional character) 34, 55, 65, 71, 101 ‘Blue Water Investment Corporation’ 39–42 Blue, Max (fictional character) 34, 42, 52, 54, 55, 69, 100–1, 136 Blue, Sonny and Bingo (fictional characters) 55–6, 71 bodily control and necropolitics 98–104 body–mind dualism 88–9 Briers, J. 96–7, 105 Buchwald, E. et al. 75 cannibalism metaphor 47 capitalism 1–12 alternative worldview 13–14, 17 see also science and medicine; slow violence; vampire capitalism Cartesianism 88–91, 92–3, 112–13 cartography map legend 121–2 naturalized logic of inequality 111–12 Cassiman, S. 28, 38, 163 Ceremony (Silko) 5, 7, 30, 119 Cherie (fictional character) 76 Cherniavsky, E. 156, 158 Chomsky, N. 8, 31, 35 climate change 152–3 Clinton (fictional character) 109, 110, 138, 154, 167–70 colonialism 1, 3 European worldview 2 global capitalism/neo-liberalism/ neo-imperialism 10, 15–16, 18, 19 and science 91, 149–50 and sexual violence 46, 83 see also resistance ‘colonization of the mind’ 106

196

Index

computer and telephone technologies 135–7 cosmopolitical narratives 122–30, 143–7 International Holistic Healers’ Convention 151–60, 172 see also resistance Coulthard, G.S. 16–17, 28, 60, 78, 79, 88, 114, 121, 178, 181 critical responses 4–12 cross-cultural coalitions 172–3, 175 ‘culture of dissection’ 89–90, 98–9 ‘culture’ as ‘wilderness’ 4–5 David (fictional character) 69–70, 72, 73 ‘death of love’/‘love of death’ 37, 63–4, 69, 89, 133 ‘death of nature’ and femicide 79–85 deep ecology 138 democracy elite usurpation of common land 48–9 and environment/natural world 2–3, 15 and global ‘free trade’ agreements 31 politics and law 51, 54 wealth and socio-political power 46 Descarte, R. see Cartesianism Donnelly, D. 34, 126–7 drug and alcohol abuse 72–4 ecofeminist theory 62–3 ecological resistance 137–41 environment/environmentalism 8–9, 10, 11, 14–16, 179–82 and democracy 2–3, 15 and economic slow violence 27–30 human—nature interdependence 88–91, 134–5, 150–1 and patriarchal oppression 62–3 and social justice movements 17–19 and vampire capitalism 41–2 Environmental Protection Agency 17 Eric (fictional character) 69–70, 99 Escapía, Angelita La (fictional character) 122, 124, 128–30, 131–2, 133, 154–5, 159, 170–2 eugenics 94–6, 103

European colonialism see colonialism; resistance Everyday Sexism Project 80 Fara, P. 62, 93 Felman, S. and Laub, D. 7, 8 femicide and ‘death of nature’ 79–85 Ferro (fictional character) 65, 71 fictional ‘entrepreneurs’ 34–5 fictional patriarchs 56, 64–5 fictional vampire capitalists 36–44 Fischer-Hornung, D. 67, 69, 82 Fisher, M. 35, 59 Foucault, M. 99, 106, 107 Galton, F. 94–6, 97, 100, 103, 104, 107–8 gender see patriarchy General J. (fictional character) 55, 56, 67, 102, 103–4 geology 112–14, 119–20 Geronimo(s) 147–51 Ghost Dance 157 Gillham, N. 94, 95 global capitalism/neo-liberalism/ neo-imperialism 10, 15–16, 18, 19 global financial crisis (2008) 162–4 globalization 9–10 greed/‘greed creed’ 33, 34, 35–6, 41–2, 43, 45 Green Vengeance 137–41 Griffin, S. 89, 90–1 grounded normativity 16–17, 28, 30, 32, 34, 42–3, 44, 49, 60, 61, 74, 78, 79, 85, 88, 181 see also reciprocal relations and obligations ‘hacktivism’: computer and telephone technologies 135–7 Hammerén, N. and Johannson, T. 63–4, 66 Harjo, J. 5, 7 Harvey, D. 30, 120 homosociality and ‘homosexuality’ 63–71 Huhndorf, S.M. 9–10 human—nature interdependence 88–91, 134–5, 150–1 Hunt, A. 130–1, 132, 136

Index Idle No More movement 34, 45, 173, 176–8 ‘Indian Connection’ 146–7 Indigenous Americans and African Americans 94–5, 109–10, 169–70, 172 deaths and exploitation 3 women, sexual violence against 80–1, 83 see also Native/Indigenous studies Indigenous cosmopolitical narratives see cosmopolitical narratives; resistance inequality, naturalized logic of 92–8, 100, 111–12 intellectual violence, academic discourse as 105–14 International Holistic Healers’ Convention 151–60, 172 International Rights of Nature Tribunals 145–6, 151, 153 Irr, C. 5, 6 Jarman, M. 101, 103 Johnson, A.G. 56, 59, 60, 61, 62–3, 64, 65–6, 67, 70–1, 74 Judge Arn (fictional character) 41, 52–4, 133 justice 10–11 social justice and environmental justice movements 17–19 see also Army of Justice Kaplan, H.A. 33, 36, 41, 45, 46 Karno, V. 133–4 Kenway, J. and Fahey, J. 36, 44 Kevles, D.J. 94, 95–6, 105 Krieger, J. 50, 51 Krishnan, A. 107 Laguna 7, 12, 108–9, 180–2 land 121–2, 145–6 human–nature relationship 134–5 ‘raiding of the commons’ 48–9 law 133–4 democracy and politics 51–2, 54 and social elites 49–56 Lawrence, J. 94

197

Lecha (fictional character) 65, 71, 72, 76, 113, 122, 127, 131, 132–3, 135, 140–1 Linebaugh, P. 14, 48, 145–6 Linnaeus, C.: classification of nature 62, 93, 95, 113 ‘love of death’/‘death of love’ 37, 63–4, 69, 89, 133 ‘machine’ metaphor 90 McNally, D. 28, 35, 37, 38, 60 McPherson, R.S. 150 ‘Mario’s Luxury Bus Tours’ (fictional company) 34, 43 Marx, K./Marxism 2, 33, 34, 36, 37, 110–11, 122, 124, 128–30, 131–2, 133, 159, 170 Mayans 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 154–5 Mbembe, A. 99–100 medicine see science and medicine Menardo (fictional character) 34, 40, 55, 102–4, 113–14, 130 ‘Universal Insurance’ company 43–4, 55–6 Merchant, C. 79, 87, 88 Merrill, T.W. 50, 51 misogyny 93 see also femicide and ‘death of nature’; sexual violence Monte (fictional character) 72, 73 Moore, D.L. 6–7, 8, 11, 147 Morton, S. 93–4, 107–8 mothers 64–5, 71–4, 82 Murphy, P. 61, 62–3 Murphy, S. and Sales, P. 72–3 Nash, R. 4–5 Native/Indigenous studies critical theory 16–17 transnational politics 9–10 see also Indigenous Americans natural world see environment/ environmentalism naturalized logic of inequality 92–8, 100, 111–12 necropolitics and violent bodily control 98–104 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 106

198 Nixon, N. 35 Nixon, R. 9, 17–18, 27, 41, 59 Obama, B. 16, 164 obligations see grounded normativity; reciprocal relations and obligations Occupy movement 33–4, 45, 173–5, 180 O’Meara, B. 138, 141 orientalism 105–6 patriarchal capitalism see science and medicine patriarchy 59–63 femicide and ‘death of nature’ 79–85 fictional characters 56, 64–5 homosociality and ‘homosexuality’ 63–71 mothers 64–5, 71–4, 82 public and private forms 61, 73, 76 ‘rape culture’ and sexualized violence 74–9 Plumwood, V. 62, 79 poverty 37, 38, 162–3, 164, 167–8, 170 Powell, A. and Henry, N. 75 Pratt, M.L. 17, 18 Queschua: ‘good way of living’ 143, 144 race/racism 48, 51–2, 82, 93–4 Ramsden, C. 146 ‘rape culture’ and sexualized violence 74–9 Ray, S.J. 140, 153, 154, 156 Reagan administration AIDS 97 campaign against drug-using mothers 72–3 Iran-–Contra controversy/‘Irangate’ 52–3, 54 poverty 37, 38, 163 Reaganomics/economic policy 31–2, 33, 35–6, 43 social policies and justice system 50–1 states’ rights 51–2 reciprocal relations and obligations 28, 33, 35–6, 39–40, 41, 43, 49, 114

Index see also grounded normativity Reed, T.V. 10, 119–22, 128, 155, 161, 165–6, 169 Rehnquist, Chief Justice W.H. 50–1 resistance 179–82 ecological 137–41 Geronimo(s) 147–51 narratives of 124 technological 130–7 see also textual and extra-textual revolution Romero, C. 155, 172–3 Root (fictional character) 72 Rose (fictional character) 131–2 Roy, Rambo (fictional character) 30, 167–9 Ryan, A. 6, 8 Said, E. 105–6 St Clair, J. 37, 63, 69 Savage, M. and Williams, K. 45, 46, 48 Sawday, J. 89, 90, 91, 98–9 science and medicine eugenics 94–6, 103 femicide and death of nature 82, 83–5 historical development 88–92 naturalized logic of inequality 92–8, 100, 111–12 necropolitics and violent bodily control 98–104 race/racism 48, 82, 93–4 scientific classification 62, 93–4, 149–50 scientific objectivity 87 Sedgwick, E. 66, 70 Seese (fictional character) 72, 73–4, 78, 126, 127 Serlo (fictional character) 40, 46–8, 56, 65, 67, 71, 82, 83–5, 92, 96, 97–8, 101, 130 sexual violence 40, 61, 74–9 abuse of children 40, 48, 67, 76 colonial 46, 83 sexuality: ‘homosexuality’ 66–70 Skow, J. 4, 6 slow violence 9, 17–18, 27–8 environmental and economic 27–30

Index and patriarchal capitalism 59–60 of vampire capitalism 30–6 snakes/serpents 180–2 social elites and vampire capitalism 44–56 social hierarchy and science 95, 98 social justice and environmental justice movements 17–19 Stanford, A.F. 5, 100, 101–2 Sterling (fictional character) 72, 182 suicide ‘eco-kamikaze’ 139 and violent death 69–70, 133–4 Suzuki, D. 151–2, 158 technological resistance 130–7 television/satellite technologies 131–4 textual and extra-textual revolution 161–6 disseminating narratives of resistance 166–72 twenty-first century contexts 172–8 Tillett, 154, 157, 162, 164, 171, 175, 176–7 transnational politics 9–10 Trexler, R.C. 75–6, 83 Trigg (fictional character) 34, 36, 40, 55, 67, 69, 71–2, 76, 100–2 Bio-Materials Inc. 37–9, 99 Trump, D.J. 16, 45, 50, 52, 74–5, 77–8, 123 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 144, 146, 150, 151 violence against women 80, 81 and ‘Worlds Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change 152–3 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME) 144–5, 146, 150, 151, 153

199

vampire capitalism 2, 8 covert ‘partners’ 44–56 fictional vampire capitalists 36–44 slow violence of 30–6 violence of academic discourse 105–14 AIDS 96–7 ‘dissection’ of the world 89–90, 98–9 femicide and death of nature 82, 83–5 necropolitics and violent bodily control 98–104 patriarchal 61–3 and torture 76–7 see also sexual violence; slow violence; suicide Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act (2013) 83 Walby, S. 61, 73 Wall Street (film) 33, 36 Williams, T.T. 2–3, 29, 49 Wilson Weasel Tail (fictional character) 155–60 witness role of reader 7–8, 11 Wolfsfeld, G. et al. 165 Womack, C. 5–6 women see patriarchy Wootten, L. 146–7, 155 ‘Worlds Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change 152–3 writer-activism 18 Yaqui 72, 112, 113, 125–6, 148, 150 Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit (Silko) 19 Yoeme (fictional character) 72, 113, 126 Yupik 122, 131–4 Zapatista movement 175–6 Zeta (fictional character) 65, 71, 72, 76, 113, 114, 136, 140