Proposal

Question: How do the sharply delineated spaces of SF reflect real spaces in our world? How are spaces integral to SF?

Media sources: Samuel R. Delany, Nova

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Literary Sources: Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacretics 16:1

Frederic Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.

Thesis: In both Nova and Snow Crash, we see our world broken into many unique and strong factions. Although separated in setting by time, the essential quality of spaces as 3rd dimensional constructs remains. Both the factions of Nova and the enclaves of Snow Crash show a postmodern view of spaces. Despite the vast gulf of time between Nova and Snow Crash and Snow Crash and ourselves, both books demonstrate contemporary spaces. Competing industries, countries, or brands. These ideas are easy for us to comprehend because they exist all around us. The SF examples merely displace them through time.

Paper Proposal

Question: Why does the image of technology in Science Fiction alienate blacks from the genre? How does technology alienate black characters in SF works? What work does technology do in creating the 'other'?

Literary texts: Nova, Samuel R. Delany

Robot Stories, Greg Pak

Bedwin Hacker, Nadia El Fani

Critical Texts: "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany," Mark Dery

*possibly - "Dangerous and Important Differences," Jeffrey A. Tucker

Passages: From "Black to the Future,"

"The miniature technology you cite is not a shiny, glittering, polished technology. Above all, it comes in matte-black, plastic boxes. From the beepers, the Walkmen, the Diskmen, through the biggest ghetto blaster - the stuff put forward as portable is not chromium. It's black."

Thesis: Throughout history, the use of technology by whites to control and animalize blacks has created a complicated relationship between blacks and technology. Through the analysis of SF literature and the genre as a whole, we can observe the use of technology to alienate blacks and create a clear division between those who use the technology and those who do not (are victims of technology?).

Proposal

Media: Battlestar Galactic and Almanac of the Dead

Critical Text: Jameson’s “Culture: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”; Irr’s “The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead”

Questions: How does race affect conceptions of time in interpretations of the future? For instance, what is the influence of history on certain races in interpretations of the future? Does this affect sexuality? Do the works I’m analyzing interpret these race-based concepts of time as good or bad?

Thesis: I want to explore how time, or one’s spatial conception, varies by race in Battlestar Galactic and Almanac of the Dead and how this affects sexuality. I want to show the consequences of a conception of time spatially focused on the present and how this is connected to race.

Proposal: The Multiracial and The Inbetween

When we imagine the future, we inevitably include aspects of race, and all of the tropes and indications that go along with that, whether a diverse cast of characters is present or not. Earlier in this course we explored works where Blackness, Whiteness, and Asianess/Technorietnalism, all monolithic, clear cut ideas about a group of people, were present. However, there are many groups of people that fall out of these clear cut categories, most especially biracial and multiracial characters. In the future what exactly does it mean to be biracial or multiracial? Does “race” even mean the same thing in a future where we find a wide range of peoples with a diverse array of racial backgrounds, or does something else became more important such as the ideas of ethnicity, social class, nationality, language, and religion? Within these new ideas are there groups that fall out of the easy boundaries just like those with multiracial backgrounds?

To explore this topic I will be looking at Postmodern Eugenics: The Future of Reproductive and Racial Thinking in Science Fiction, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and Nova by Samuel R. Delany.

The future will not be devoid of race and ethnicity, as the Time Magazine cover mentioned in Kustritz’s article would try to have us believe with it’s “lightly tanned” American. In two science fiction novels we have two worlds that have very different racial climates; one where racial differences very much exist among a landscape of a fractured country (Snow Crash) and another where many characters have diverse, multiracial backgrounds (Nova). However within these world’s we observe the existence of “ethnicity” that seem to have fallen through the cracks of the society’s tendency to easily categorize people whether it be by nationality or “franchise”, race, economic status. By understanding the representations of the multiracial identity, and the ethnicities or groups of people that fall into the uncategorizable portions of society, we can further understand what it means to be a multiracial person in the present.

Michael Randolph

Proposal

Question: How does the introduction of machine and technology into human society affect gendering in the imagined future?

Texts:
Nova by Samuel R. Delany
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose

Thesis: Gendering of technology, as either feminine or masculine, creates divisions while technology that remains neutered is used to create a new categorization, in which race or sex is less divisive.

Proposal

Final Paper

Literary Texts:
Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Almanac of the Dead Leslie Marmon Silko

Articles:
“The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or a Postmodern Rewriting of Radical Fiction” by Caren Irr
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
*I haven’t entirely decided if these are the best articles to use or not.

Question: How do history and prophecy, particularly in science fiction, interact to create our perception of the present? What effect do history and prophecy have on what will actually happen?

Thesis: Those in power determine what our history is, thus maintaining the status quo. That history informs the present and defines all prophecy of the future. Thus, efforts to change the past, as in Lathe of Heaven, fundamentally disrupt the present and future, whereas belief in prophecies, as in Almanac of the Dead, actually reinforces the society that caused the need for them. Therefore, effective change is best achieved through a reimagining of the past rather than forward looking action.

Quotes/ Passages:
“I have had dreams that… that affected the… non-dream world. The real world.”
“Not prophetic dreams. I can’t foresee anything. I simply change things” (Le Guin 11).

“He’s encouraging me… to change reality by dreaming that it’s different” (Le Guin 45).

“That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time- only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream” (Le Guin 71).

“This knowledge [assumptions accepted in the literary community] holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first Africans and then African-Americans in the United States “ (Morrison 5).

“The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (Morrison 6).

“It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view.”
“…in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse” (Morrison 9).

“…time as ‘we’ know it is an orderly, consistent, sensible, and nonprophetic repetition of an initial totality” (Irr 223).

“Thus, the almanac is simultaneously a record of events (e.g., anniversaries) and a prediction; it occupies a transitive ground between past and future, as well as between English and Spanish, and official and folk religion” (Irr 226).

“However, while European narratives of this event generally attribute all historical agency to Europeans, in Almanac of the Dead as in her previous novel Ceremony, Silko does the opposite; she frames the arrival of the Europeans and the epoch of the Death-Eye Dog with developments in native culture” (Irr 228).

“ On one hand, the concept of an absolute time moving forward in mobile space is tied to the concept of utopian transformation, or a new epoch…” (Irr 234).

“Sacred time is always in the Present” (Silko 136).

“…the past was history and no longer mattered” (Silko 390).

“If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up” (Silko 431).

“What was coming could not be stopped; the people might join or not; the tribal people of North America could come to the aid of the twins and their followers or they could choose not to help. It made no difference because what was coming was relentless and inevitable; it might require five or ten years of great violence and conflict. It might require a hundred years of spirit voices and simple population growth, but the result would be the same: tribal people would retake the Americas; tribal people would retake ancestral land all over the world” (Silko 711-712).

Final Paper

The question driving my paper is why cyberpunk/ techno-Orientalist literature focuses highly on Japanese cultural influences, but seems to lack a Japanese hero.

I am using Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. My critical text is David Morely and Kevin Robin's "Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic"
In Blade Runner I will be focusing on the use of the Japanese backdrop, the fact that Los Angeles is unrecognizable, the one scene at the ramen stand, and the one Japanese scientist who makes eyes.
In Snow Crash, I am focusing on the scenes that describe the "Nipponese" businessmen and Hiro's past, mostly his relationship with the Japanese. I will also be discussing the use of sushi-K and how that even in this techno-oriented society their is no Japanese hero. All the Japanese are described with a sameness about them.
In the criticism, I will be using the points focusing on the fear of the Japanese and the stereotypical remarks of how the Japanese are viewed.
I have about thirty to forty textual sources that I will be using from Snow Crash and the criticism.

Two prime examples of Techno-Orientalism as defined by David Morely and Kevin Robins’ article “Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic” are Ridley Scott’s cult film Blade Runner (1982), and Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992). Both the film and novel present western societies overrun by Japanese influences, yet neither glorifies the Japanese as a heroic figure. Instead, Blade Runner and particularly Snow Crash use Japanese influence as a foil to glorify western heroes.

Final Paper

Literary Text and Films:

Nova, Samuel R. Delaney

Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Leguin

Articles:

Morely, David

TECHNO-ORIENTALISM: JAPAN PANIC IN: Spaces Of Identity, 1995, p.147-173

Question:

How is the portrayal of the other in science fiction an aid to understanding otherness in reality, particularly on a global scale?

Thesis:

In both Nova and Lathe of Heaven, treatment of the other is dependent almost completely on the extent to which the other is controllable, its behaviour in line with society’s expectations. This is reminiscent of the “Japan Panic” described in David Morely’s work on techno-orientalism. My argument is that science fiction’s portrayal of the other is closely linked to reality, and that beyond that, it has much to offer, even to the extent of breaking down the barrier between sameness and the other.

Quotes:

“However , their unaggressiveness having been accepted by the WPC, and the modesty of their numbers and aims being apparent, they had been received with a certain eagerness into Terran society. It was pleasant to have somebody different to look at. They seemed to intend to stay, if allowed; some of them had already settled down to running small businesses, for they seemed to be good at salesmanship and organization, as well as space flight, their superior knowledge of which they had at once shared with Terran scientists” - (Le Guin 133)

“Some of the newer academics question the institute’s preoccupation with the twentieth century. Nearly one out of four of our galleries is devoted to it...Perhaps they resent that it has been the traditional concern of scholars for eight hundred years; they refuse to see the obvious. At the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lives on several worlds...Until humanity becomes something much, much more different, that time must be the focus of scholarly interest: that was the century in which we became.” (Delaney 156)

and

“That’s just gypsies. We never had them. We never wanted them. I took them because I was by myself, and - well, I guess it was easier.”... “But that was still no reason for them to come and run us out of town whenever we got settled. Once, I remember, they got two gypsies, and killed them. They beat them up till they were half dead, and then cut their arms off and hung them head down from trees to bleed to death -” (Delaney 125)

“It is this complexity and ambiguity in the image of Japan that has given it a particular resonance in Western fantasies. But, if it has been complex, it has always been possible symbolically to control this image of Japan...But no more. That integrity is now being assaulted by a Japan that is no longer content only to provide the West with spectacle.” (Morely 148)

Final

Literary Text and Films:
Battlestar Galactica

Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko

Articles:
"The Timelines of Almanac of the Dead, Or a Postmodern Rewriting of Radical Fiction" Caren Irr

Question:

How does race lead to guiltless destruction?

Thesis:

In both Battlestar Galatica and Almanac of the Dead, combatants use and need race to objectify the other as evil. In so doing, innocence and the individual are removed and replaced by historically charged racial classification. Thus, violent destruction of the other becomes guiltless and even, necessary.

Quotes:

“you said that humanity was a flawed creation. And that People still kill one another for pretty jealousy and greed. That humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive. Maybe you don't’” (Resurrection Ship: Part 2 20m)

“So I want to talk a little about terrorism first. You spiritual bankrupts! You breeders of child molesters, rapists, and mass murderers! We are increasing quietly despite your bullets and germ warfare. You destroyers can’t figure out why you haven’t wiped us out in five hundred years of blasting, burning, and slaughter” (Silko 734).

“Indians however were the worst workers-slow, sloppy, and destructive of tools and machinery. Indians were a waste of time and money. No refugee camps for them-the best policy was quick annihilation on the spot” (Silko 495)

Memory, Reproduction, and Cultural Continuity

Literary Text and Films:
Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko
Children of Men
Critical Articles:
"Postmodern Eugenics," Anne Kustritz
"The Human Project: Biological Dystopia and the Utopian Politics of Race in Children of Men and 28 Days Later," Jayna Brown

Questions: How does the representation of the past reflect anxiety over issues of cultural purity and cultural extinction? Particularly, how does this affect the portrayal of sexuality and reproduction?

Thesis: The past comes under constant reinterpretation to meet the needs of the present, as it becomes a venue to discuss present events in a distant plane. The extreme of this rule is in the representation of societies in existential crisis, like the globe in Children of Men, or Native American society in Almanac of the Dead. Since threats to the purity or existence of a culture are based on continuation, reproduction, and by extension, sexuality, are placed under extreme stress.

Quotes:
It takes a certain kind of forgetting for the idea “Wouldn’t it be cool if Native Americans never existed?” to gain traction as the premise of a mainstream novel by a prominent sci-fi/fantasy writer, rather than as the punch line of a racist joke. Thirteenth Child presents a murky racial and eugenic pastiche, erasing its own foundation as part of hundreds of years of colonial dreams of an all-white America and a human future without native people. - Kustritz

The film mourns the death of 1960’s utopianism and implies its impotency, its inability to raise a lasting progeny. Paternity is a source of ambivalence throughout the film. The 1960’s abandoned its children: the anti-nuclear generation in the 1980’s, made up of feminists and other environmental activists camped out at Greenham common, and the late 1990’s WTO protesters, to ineffectual escapism, consumerism and militarism. - Brown

That was something the white man did - worry ahead of time. the white man had had all the radio waves to himself; but funny thing was, white man didn't have anything alive left to say. Clinton wanted black people to know all their history; he wanted them to know all that had gone on before in Africa; how great and powerful gods had traveled from Africa with the people. He wanted black Americans to know how deeply African blood had watered the soil of the Americas for five hundred years... - Silko 416

Relations between Scopophilia and Castration Anxiety

Without men's fear of castration, would scopophilia and voyeurism continue to be such common masculine instincts?

Mulvey's references to psychoanalysis in regards to the precedented dynamics between men and women and the following passage inspired this question.

"But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself" (Mulvey 205).


My stance on this question, and therefore my thesis, is:

When scopophilic and voyeuristic thoughts arise in the immediate presence of a woman, a man is subconsciously attempting to diminish the woman's power in order to escape his castration anxiety. Men visualize women in voyeuristic and scopophilic ideals in order to cater to their phallocentric needs. By materializing women, men are belittling them and their power in order to retain confidence in the face of possible castration.

With the support of:
"The argument returns again to the psychoanalytic background in that woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat" (Mulvey 208).

Some specific passages:

In Snow Crash when Raven sees the clear-minded Y.T. serving fish to the men and women on the Raft he immediately develops an interest in her. Not only has she managed to escape the brainwashing of the drug Snow Crash, but she is also not visually intimidated or embarrassed in his frightening, established presence. In order to keep her recognizably strong character in check, Raven immediately begins to court her to prove to himself that he has power over her and that there is no threat of the castration of his male dominance. When Y.T. asks, "'So, uh, do you want me to serve up some fish, or are you gonna stay hungry?' The big Aleut stares at her for a while. Then he jerks his head sideways and says, 'Come on. Let's get the fuck out of here'" (320).

Another instance of sexual thoughts or actions in response to
Another instance where men's fear of power limitation leads to sexual thoughts or actions is the form of torture Lt. Thorne uses on Cylon prisoners seen in the episode Pegasus of the the television show Battlestar Galactica. In this episode, Thorne is introduced as the Cylon interrogator, but he does much more than question the captive Cylons. Because of the threat Cylons pose to Thorne and the human race in general, Thorne feels he needs to abuse and rape the two women in order to prove his power over them to himself. Thorne needs to prove this power in order to successfully disregard his anxiety over the castration of his power of which the two Cylon women are capable. Thorne's need is first exhibited with the reveal of the Pegasus captive Number Six Cylon and her frail and beaten condition. Later, we see Thorne attempting to exterminate his fear of castration again when he tries to beat and rape Sharon, a Galactica captive Cylon. In both of these instances, Thorne's fear of the dominance of the Cylons and therefore the castration of his power leads him to sexual violence. Furthermore, the guards assigned to protect Lt. Thorne throughout his "interrogations" take voyeuristic pleasure in Thorne's abuse of the Cylons. Not only does the physical limiting of the Cylons' power please Thorne, but it pleases the men who witness it because it lessens their fear of castration as well.

A further look into each of these characters' reactions to castration anxiety will be taken in the paper itself. These two instances are glimpses into the general idea of the argument I will be attempting to make in my paper.

Racial Concepts of Time and Homosexuality

Irr’s essay “The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or a Postmodern Rewriting of radical Fiction” clarified for me the most important aspects in the differences Almanac highlights between Indian and Euro-American ideologies or mentalities, those being the ways in which each group supposedly views time and history. The Native American supposedly views time in its full scale, taking into account past, present, and future; although there are epochs that delineate history, such as the current Reign of Dog Eat Dog, Indian mythology encompasses them all in an overlying understanding of the continuity and connectivity of time via the gods. In contrast, the book criticizes the Euro-American, or white, conceptualization of time as overly focused on the linear present and future. Not only do the European “aliens”, both in the present and the past timelines, ignore their past, they essentially have none since they were born to a land that is not “rightfully” theirs and has only been inhabited by them for a relatively short period of time.

In particular, Irr’s explanation of how this concept of Euro-American time as it applied to homosexuality in the novel alleviated much of the possible homophobia in the book for me. After reading the detailed fetishes of another villainous gay or closeted male character for the sixth time, I had to wonder whether Silko aims for some kind of homophobic message, perhaps in connecting with the cruelty and emotional indifference Silko imparts to many white characters as ailments of the whole European race and the Reign of Death-Eat Dog. She could intend this, but the issues of fetishes and control that plague these homosexual white characters more importantly connect to her books grander theme of the European conception of time as based off “fresh starts” and the denial of the past. Irr points out that, although most of the homosexual men of the novel have fetishes, none compare with the grotesque videos of the heterosexual police chief, whose denial of his own pleasure in creating the films only greatens the perversion of the act. Not only is perversion present across sexual orientation lines, it shows an aspect of sexual arousal in the act of torture: “…it is suggested that there is a link between repression and arousal, between denying one’s history and torturing those who remind you of it, and this link occurs in both hetero- and homosexual contexts.” (237) As most homosexuals in the book do not actually identify as such or are not “out” in society, torture, or other fetishes, act as a way of physically punishing and denying impulses that the character cannot come to terms with. Judge Arne, for instance, does not like to identify as bisexual though he clearly is attracted to both sexes; instead, he reverts to bestiality, which he seems to feel less guilt over, and refuses to put on a name, or cap, on his sexual desires. Similarly, Serlo is obviously attracted to men, but refuses to act on any sexual desires as a result of both self-denial and self-superiority. Cases of repressed or denied homosexuality, and the resulting fetishes and torture that come from this repression, highlight Almanac’s underlying theme of white men ignoring their past, in this case past desires, and consistently trying to start afresh. Almanac’s are not so much evil or sadistic as they are examples of the white man’s aversion to his full temporal identity, and victims to the consequences of the repression this aversion causes.

Emergence of the "Fragmented" Society

“The novel describes a highly fragmented postmodern social world in which, following the decomposition of the metaphysics of Eurocentric temporality, many people have only partial, photographic access to their history, and these isolated strands of history entangle themselves until they are finally set into motion in a collapsing universe” (Irr).

Both Almanac of the Dead and Bedwin Hacker demonstrate the emergence of “fragmented” societies. What we see in both is a world in which the “Eurocentric” nationalist world has decomposed to the point where the fragmented societies can exercise significant power.

In Almanac of the Dead the Native American remnants, begin to retake some power from the white institutions which have traditionally subjugated them. "A day would come as had not been seen in five thousand years. On this day, a conjunction would occur; everywhere at once, spontaneously, the prisoners, the slaves, and the dispossessed would rise up. The urge to rise up would come to them through their dreams. All at once, all over the world, police and soldiers would be outnumbered” (Silko 616). We witness the reversal of fortunes mentioned in lore.

In Bedwin hacker, the future very literally equalizes the 1^st and 3^rd world. Kalt is capable of disrupting life in the 1^st world by hacking. Her message -- “in the third millennium there are other people…other lives…” – clearly shows the emergence of fragmented societies, particularly the Arab world, which is stereotypically anti-technology. Kalt threatens 'modern' society because she has power outside the normal channels.

Spatial Time and Hidden Histories

All throughout the Leslie Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, we are warned of the great dangers that come from ignoring the past and history. One of it’s great criticisms of the Euro-centric Western Culture is that it tries much to quickly to discard of the past for the linear present and future, when according to American Indian conceptions of spatial time the past is very much interwoven with what happens in the present and the future. Understanding the past fully is necessary; the old adage we must understand history or we are doomed to repeat it comes to mind.

Caren Irr describes time in the Almanac as “something endlessly available, something spatial; it is something through which one can travel forward and back like a god.” Indeed with the sheer size of the Almanac and the way Silko jumps from the past to present through a dizzying array of characters truly proves this point.

Throughout the book, it is this “spatial” time that is triumphed as the correct way of looking at history and not the “partial, photographic” history practiced by Europeans. Throughout the book we are shown an array of Europeans who constantly ignore the past, contributing to “the collapsing universe”. Clinton makes it his personal mission to uncover the true history of African Americans, and says, “To read the white man’s version, Africans were responsible for the plantation slavery in the New World. But African slaves only replaced Native American slaves.” (406). Also, La Escapia, puts the white Cuban Bartolomeo on trial “for crimes against the people’s history.” The young communist ignored all that happened before Castro in the Americas, in his trial disgustingly saying to the Mexican Indians, “Jungle monkeys and savages have no history!” (525). However, La Escapia proves him wrong to a rioting crowd by rattling off a list of revolutions that had occurred in the Americas without white communist help or aide.

These histories which are swept under the rug in the narrative of American History further show the Western tendency towards the “partial” and photographic. There is no need to look at how all people were effected by the events of history, because the only history that mattered was in the context of Europe and it’s descendants. It is a linear view, linked with the imagery of the genealogy tables of pure blood that had obsessed Serlo so much. The Almanac argues for an expansion of this linear genealogy to include people of color that have shaped the landscape as much or more then Europeans.

Michael Randolph

We Are Not a Mirage

Almanac of the Dead and Bedwin Hacker espouse similar manifestos in the sense that both seem to be screaming at the Western world, "There are others out there, we are here, and we demand to be respected."

Indeed in Bedwin Hacker, Kalt makes fools of France and other Western countries with the success and ubiquity of her hacking messages on Western television stations. A Tunisian woman, Kalt exudes an aura of power and control: her hacking skills are unparalleled, as even the French police organization cannot track her down; she is unable to be tricked or double-crossed, as she catches Chams when he attempts to access files on her computer while she is gone; she is in complete sexual control over Chams, and she intimidates him into being submissive and filling the traditionally female gender role. Her friend group in Tunisia is atypical of Tunisians in general, liberationists who smoke and drink and dance together, but we are made quite aware of the presence of people like these in Third World, Muslim countries.

In a world where the Third World has no voice at all, Bedwin Hacker stands up to the First World and proclaims, "In the third millennium there are other epochs, other places, other lives. We are not a mirage."

In a similar manner, Silko writes a novel that defies the traditional style of Western fiction literature. Almanac comes under criticism for being "naive to the point of silliness" in its depiction of class struggle, the oppressed simply being able to rise up and take back what is theirs (Irr 223); these criticisms, however, come from western theorists, who fail to recognize that there are other ways to write a novel. Silko employs a radically different temporal view of the universe and, through this temporal confusion, creates a novel in which the reader is also spatially and socially confused. The disorientation from the traditional social practices and psychology in Almanac is meant to declare to the reader, and perhaps to the Western-dominated world, "we (Native Americans) are here, we are not a mirage." The temporal and social "style" of Alamanac alone, even in the absence of its more explicit themes and moral judgements against western culture, is a statement that the ways of the west do not dominate all - Native Americans, women, slaves, the oppressed all over the world, have a voice and will take back what is theirs.

“Zeta smiled; she had to marvel at the hatred white men harbored for all women, even their own.” (704)

Like Megan, I noticed how the portrayal of sex for women in Almanac was very different from the scenes narrated from a male perspective. Despite the abundance of extremely graphic sex scenes that fill the book, the stories overwhelmingly feature men enacting the cruel acts, and almost exclusively men taking pleasure in them.

In minds of the male characters, the women who will have sex are devalued. Trigg, an angry paraplegic, will call the women who avoid sex with him by name, like Diane and Susan, but those who are tricked into his backseat are merely “panhellenic piggies.” (388) Also, the only female employee of Trigg’s biomaterials operation who earns recognition is Peaches, who has avoided giving Trigg sexual favors.

Only uncomfortable sex is described with insight to a female’s thoughts. Although Lecha has a pleasant, perhaps even mutual relationship with Root, it is described from his perspective. Another example of unpleasant sex is Alegría, the competitive architect who lost her career over an affair with a client. Her gratification from the relationship comes from material satisfaction, not physical, though she is obviously having sex with Menardo. Even after Alegría is married to Menardo, we hear her thoughts about despising sex with him, forcing herself to and even then positioning herself so she doesn’t have to look at him. The narrator provides Alegría’s thoughts just before or in the middle of sexual encounters with Menardo, so we are exposed to her discomfort and displeasure with sex.

It’s not as if she does not take pleasure in the act of sex itself. The narrator describes Alegría’s fantasies about Sonny Blue. The weird thing is that Sonny makes reference to having had sex with her, so the actual sex has occurred; it is not that she has only fantasized about pleasurable sex. She has had it during the events the book covers, but the narrator does not describe those acts. Why not? It’s not as though Silko seems particularly concerned about the length of her book, as it nears 800 pages, and she is not afraid of sex, as explicit torture porn and zoophilia are intimately explored. Silko seems to make a deliberate choice to keep the female characters unsatisfied.

Going back to our last discussion, where we talked about the discomfort and distancing style that is strongest at the novel’s start, I think the choice to describe sex as chore-like serves to further the effect. The women in Almanac are not very approachable, and their sex lives are only a part in that. An equally distancing technique is the names of the women themselves. For example, Zeta is merely the Spanish word for the letter “Z.” Instead of a full name the woman goes by a letter—can you be more devalued than being reduced to a single character?

Though alienation through name happens to the males too (El Feo, or The Ugly, comes to mind), the constant devaluing and denial of pleasure for women is more prevalent throughout the book.

Sexual Agency

This week I was particularly intrigued by the interplay of sexuality and power in both Almanac of the Dead and Bedwin Hacker. While Almanac is rife with sex, I didn't really consider how all of that sex related to the power dynamics of the various plots until a particular scene in Bedwin Hacker. Towards the end of the film, there is a scene when Kalt and Marianne are discussing what has happened while the little girl continues working on the computer. Chams walks in, attempts to join the conversation, and ends up looking utterly confused. He eventually wanders out of the house in a daze.

Chams' reaction to seeing his two lovers exerting their latent power was very interesting. While their ability with computers was nothing new, he was not used to confronting the idea that they were very much his betters, at least in this aspect. The effect is further emphasized by the fact that the girl is sitting there, working. Even a small child has more power than this fully grown man. However, while the girl makes for a powerful effect, the relationships between the three adults are what makes the situation interesting. Marianne and Kalt have a past that Chams was unaware of, even while he was intimately involved with both of them. This control of information gave the women power over Chams, which they both promptly exploited. The womens' relationship with each other was apparently more influential and more equal than either of their relationships with Chams. This particular scene is interesting because is shows Chams becoming aware of his insignificance and powerlessness.

Almanac of the Dead also explores the interplay of sex and power in many of its various permutations through the convoluted relationships of the characters. At times it seems like each character is romantically, or at least physically, involved with at least three other characters. This is, technically, an exaggeration, but promiscuity is certainly an issue well explored. One relationship I'd like to examine is the Ferro, Jamey, and Paulie. While Ferro denies being remotely interested in Paulie, the attraction between them gives him a great amount of power over Paulie. In contrast, his relationship with Jamey gives Jamey the majority of the power. The difference is that because Ferro is not physically involved with Paulie, he has a clearer understanding of the sway he holds.

Another obvious example of sex being tied with power is complicated story of David, Eric, Seese, Beaufrey, and Serlo. David held power over Eric and Seese through their relationships. However, those relationships existed in part because of the psychological games Beaufrey was playing. However, had Beaufrey not been attracted to David, there would be no power struggle between the two, and thus no use of Eric and Seese as pawns. David used those two to make Beaufrey jealous and to exert his sexual power over someone else. Serlo is a very interesting character because while his presence greatly increases the sexual tension of the plot line, he denies that he is a sexual being at all. This gives him the greatest power because he is withholding sex indefinitely from all those who are attracted to him. He exerts control over himself as well as Beaufrey and David by remaining abstinent.

One could certainly take this analysis further, applying the concept of sexual agency to Angelita, Lecha, Zeta, Root, Trigg, Calabazas, Menardo, Alegria, and Leah Blue. They all exploited, or were exploited through, power gained through sexual relations or the lack thereof. By making sex such a pervasive part of the book, Silko shows how important it is in understanding human relations. In Almanac of the Dead and Bedwin Hacker, sex makes the world go round.

“The Hopi wouldn’t mind; they’d wait. The Barefoot Hopi’s entire philosophy was to wait; a day would come as had not been seen in five thousand years. On this day, a conjunction would occur; everywhere at once, spontaneously, the prisoners, the slaves, and the dispossessed would rise up. The urge to rise up would come to them through their dreams. All at once, all over the world, police and soldiers would be outnumbered”. - (Silko 616)

In Almanac of the Dead, we see elements such as the poor and the descendents of displaced Indians getting ready to bring down a rotting, decadent government, which is shown to be brutal (the killings of starving Mexicans (631)), corrupt (“cocaine smuggling was a lesser evil than communism” (648)), and incompetent, at least economically, with poverty and discontent spreading through all strata of society - “Calabazas had noticed an important difference: this time the rioters did not loot or set fires in black neighbourhoods. They had set fire to Hollywood instead...hundreds of both black and white youths had blocked firefighters and fought police on Sunset Boulevard” (630)

In Bedwin Hacker, as well, we also see Kalt and her compatriots attempt to expose weaknesses in the government’s control over information. While projecting the image of a camel holding a placard saying “We are not a mirage” cannot quite be called a revolution on the scale of those planned in Almanac of the Dead, the spirit is the same.

At one point, we see Chams warn Kalt “they’re more powerful than you. They’ll always be more powerful”. To which she responds, “in my world...you need courage. You have to want to resist”. While it is true that courage is required, (something that Kalt has in abundance, we see her having to comfort her male compatriot when he falters by pointing out that the border, and safety, is close by), there is a similarity between Hopi and Kalt’s strategy in that they attempt to use subversive, unconventional techniques to overcome the obvious advantage the government has in sheer resources and power. Kalt’s weapon of choice is cyberspace, while Hopi believes in reaching his followers through dreams; “the help of the spirit world” (620). Hopi believes that the weapons of the government would be useless, because “the power lies in the presence of the spirits and the effect on our enemies’ morale” (626).

We are never told the outcome of the uprising of Indians under Barefoot Hopi and La Escapía. However, you get the feeling at least, that given the realistic setting of this book, the hopes of a revolution based on spirits damaging enemy morale and “earthquakes and tidal waves [wiping out] entire cities and great chunks of U.S. wealth”, caused by “angry earth spirits, are rather unrealistic hopes.

In the end, while the Bedwin Hacker evades the clutches of the police, it is at the expense of successfully spreading her message. It seems that to some extent, Chams’ words have proved true, that the government is always going to be more powerful, regardless what methods or avenues one takes. In both these imagined settings, opposing the Man seems to be a futile endeavour.

Ramblings after finishing Almanac of the Dead

After finishing Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, I realized a bizarre fact, that Leslie Marmon Silko is the anti-Walt Disney. Now, this isn’t because Disney movies tend to be overly exuberant and happy, but instead, Silko has a tendency to kill off the major characters that are male in the novel, but allow the equally despicable female characters to suffer, yet survive. I found this tendency to be bizarre. If I were the novelist, I would try to save the good characters, not the villainous ones. While characters like Seese’s baby boy, Monte, and Menardo’s wife, Iliana, may have died tragic deaths, these characters aren’t nearly as despicable and screwed up as Menardo, Alegria, and the Blue family.
Menardo’s naïveté really shocked me. He becomes so obsessed with the fact that he is bulletproof it is almost like a little kid with a Superman fantasy who believes he can fly. Menardo is so sure that he cannot be hurt that he tells his driver Tacho to shoot him so that people would know that he is bullet proof. Ironically, his vest was manufactured incorrectly, and the bullet kills him. Max Blue also dies by being struck by lightning. Silko punishes the characters she creates to show the hand of G-d and to create some semblance of a moral structure. Only Alegria shows some signs of change of heart and intelligence. When she is stranded in the Mexican desert, her relentless personality really shines bright. While she is still a greedy witch, because as she almost loses consciousness, she says “‘Oh my little beauties! I love you, I love you; I owe you my life’”(687). Her “little beauties” refer to the jewels and safety deposit box numbers that she leeched off of Menardo.
I guess that what really annoys me about her character is that even after a life and death situation, she still only cares about money. I realize that money is a facet of life, but it isn’t the only thing. There should be some sort of human connection and I feel that Silko only creates a dynamic where there is a sexual connection. All the characters stories focus around bizarre sexual excursions, including one gay romance with a college student who becomes an undercover cop, and another involving a paralyzed business focused man who has orgasms in his mind. These bizarre interactions portray human connections as only good for using people and not for any emotional connection. Of course, the one human connection that seems to be pure is that of Seese’s love for her son Monte. However, Silko sours this relationship because Seese is a cocaine addict and Monte is kidnapped and killed. So while Seese cannot believe that her baby is dead, the human emotional connection, in essence love, is destroyed.
However, I found that in this example of Silko’s writing, other than Sterling, she presents most of the male characters as without feeling and hope. Sterling was one of the few characters that I felt comes to terms with himself. While Seese eventually realizes, or at least the reader does, that her baby dies, she doesn’t really show growth, she just wallows in grief at the end of the novel. Sterling, however comes to a realization about his situation. When he returns to the tribal land he is at peace with being an outsider. Silko writes, “Sterling didn’t look like his old self,” (762-63) because he is a changed man and has accepted fate. I feel that he truly changes whereas other characters don’t.
I feel like this novel really separates the white American from the society in the novel. As a white reader, this is a rather unusual experience. I almost felt that this was some distant past or some totally imagined future. At times, it seems like this can’t be the present. Very little relates to life in the northeast, and I can’t really picture being in Mexico or living that life.
Another little thing that bothered me about the novel was how briefly all the characters actually came together. I was expecting some large chaotic collision of every character, but it seemed by the time most of the characters met, a lot of them were already dead. While the chaos of the multiple uprisings was intriguing, I was expecting something more for the conclusion of a seven hundred-page tome filled with what could be seen as individual stories that didn’t need to go together.
In class we discussed how this novel isn’t science fiction, yet it is a parallel version of our own earth in our own time. It took me a while, but I with the novels end I finally understand how Almanac of the Dead is a dystopian novel set in the present. With the uprising of the masses and the idea of communist and homeless factions moving northward to America, the novel is eerily similar to that of Children of Men and other dystopian novels. While I don’t think that the homeless could really be organized into a Vietnam Veterans Army the idea is quite frightening and also quite sad. I would like to believe that our government is working toward an end to the homeless, even in these tough economic times. Sterling in the end of the novel hints that snake is looking south and that the people will be on the move north (763). This means that the forces of destruction are imminent and that we will not be able to stop it.

Power Struggles

As Thomson wonderfully stated below me, Almanac of the Dead is the epitome of a mosaic-novel. Take one piece out and the rest will still stand intact, and that piece will stand intact, but it will not be quite as well understood unless the two are combined once more. Thus, I took into account a particularly blaring similarity between each life detailed in Silko's novel: the extremely detailed, explicit sexuality. It would be easy and undoubtedly much more comfortable to claim that this novel would have been the same story line, share the same message, with or without this particular element, but it's presence is one of obvious significance.

Perhaps this oversexualized text serves to bring contrast the baseness and simplicity of human nature with the multiple and convoluted schemes that take place throughout the book. It seems as though Silko is commenting on the inability to escape the animalistic even when the action performed seems inseparable from the human-ness of it. This is especially obvious and pertinent in the explanation of the "The general's other theory... that man had learned the use of rape through the observation of the sexual behavior of stallions in the wild" (338). With the direct connection to animalistic tendencies, even when it seemed as though the methodology was complex and based on some sort of elevated human intellect.

If one considers this particular scene more closely in which Tacho and the general discuss blood and violence and the torture of prisoners, it is interesting to note the ways in which it serves to equalize characters. Mernardo is at once the odd one out because he "had never lifted a hand against anyone" (338). Thus, the Indian and the general who understand suffering through the eyes of the inflicter are elevated over Mernardo, whose naivette is twisted into a reproachable sort of ignorance.

More interesting yet is the existence of a sexually liberalized set of female characters. Silko's women remind me of modernist male characters in their emotional detachment from the physical act of sex. Despite their apparent agency, it becomes clear as one hops from character to character that although these women allow for sexual encounters, their consciousness exists on a plane much separated from their corporal forms. This is exhibited clearly in Zeta, Lecha, and Alegria's separate stories - at no time is sex enjoyable unless it is particularly initiated by the woman (in the case of Lecha and Root's relationship, for example). The descriptions could almost be likened to an uncomfortable visit to the dentist, or simply one more task in which the surrender of agency creates a position of power for these women in a round-about sort of way.

It would be unfair to make a clear judgment on the moral righteousness of any of the characters because they seem almost bloated with strange idiosyncratic elements such as the obsession with violence, sex, or drugs. In this, I've also found myself incapable of only indicting the male characters for their flaws because although the women of the book appear at first to be less guilty of baseness, it is simply more indirect. I am still at a loss to understand what Silko intends as commentary for the human race as a whole, and on a smaller scale the dynamic between male and female, sex and violence.

The Politics of Representation and Transgression

"There is lots of modernity in Arab countries today that people refuse to see or to stare directly in the face. And then Tunisia is one of the most advanced Arab countries in terms of women’s rights. We have laws that protect our liberties. It’s our schizophrenic and paradoxical side. When one is behind closed doors, one can do anything, but you really can’t advertise it. Besides, what shocks people, it’s not the fact of whether or not what I tell exists, but rather that I show it. There is real hypocrisy there…Tunisian society is a society of the Not-Said. You’ve got to shake up this mentality a little, and my film is there for that!" - Nadia El Fani, Interview with Afrik.com, found at http://spot.pcc.edu/~mdembrow/Interview%20El%20Fani%20Afrik.com.htm

Bedwin Hacker offers a decidingly different view of the Arabic world than we're used to seeing. Kalt, a Tunisian woman, hacks into the French media system to broadcast a message asserting the presence of the Third World (in the Fanonian sense), in a country that would as soon erase them from presence. The film, both within its plot, and and as a product of its very production, asserts the place of the Middle East in the "modern world." Bedwin Hacker's message asserts "This is not a technical error," belieing the ease with which French residents of Middle Eastern descent are subject to constant interrogation, threats of deportation, and almost societal erasure. El Fani also flaunts the sexuality of her characters, daring to portray lesbian and bisexual relationships, in a film aimed at an audience substantially shocked by such displays.
The film shares many associations with Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Where El Fani contents herself with a character who hacks French media to leave peaceful, if disruptive, messages, Silko crafts the rumblings of a revolution in the Americas. She consciously rewrites history, offering a true chronology of black and Native life on the continents that counters the prevailing mythology, an act which both reclaims the past and estranges an uninformed reader. It is intriguing that for El Fani to find a place for her society in the modern world, she must offer a saga of the present, but for Silko to find a place in the present, she must insist on a new version of the past. Both Middle Eastern and Native American societies may be perceived as "primitive" in the societal imagination, but the Middle East is known to be present, if perhaps in a different developmental time. Native Americans, however, are frequently dismissed as long gone. It's telling then that Silko introduces dynamic Native characters of all types, dismissing the tropes that insist on an obsession with nature or "spiritual" ways, to populate a world of twisted, but real characters, an action clearly against mythic time.
The sexuality in Bedwin Hacker finds an interesting mirror in the sexual perversions of Almanac, from the police force that makes sex videos from its interrogations, to Trigg, the sexual maniac in the wheelchair, to Judge Arne, who enjoys intercourse with his beagles. It's not much of a stretch to argue that no one in this novel is "normal." Activities that one might find repulsive and disturbing are repeated to the point of the commonplace, to the point where they no longer shock, as the reader instead develops almost an ennui of the grotesque. This aesthetic of constant discomfort forces a careful reading, an attention to minutae.
There exists a decidedly Robin Hood -esque conception at work in both texts. In Bedwin Hacker, the manifestation is more obvious, as Kalt uses the master's tools to attack his vision of reality. In Almanac, it is instead the more general outlaw aesthetic of La Escapia and the Barefoot Hopi. Although there is a certain nobility to these portrayals, of the weak against the powerful, it intrigues me that the authors chose to fill their works with active transgressions against the social order, compared to some of other texts we have used, like Children of Men and Dawn, where the transgression occurs more in the space between the reader and the text. What work do these transgressions do? Do they keep the positionality of subaltern characters as the Other, or do they serve to deconstruct the categories at work? Are such transgressions an inevitable part of this form of literature?

Mortality and Causality

“They are no longer solitary human souls; they are part of a single configuration of energy. Their spirits are close with us now as we all gather here. They love us and watch over us with our beloved ancestors.” (Almanac of the Dead 733)

“The novel describes a highly fragmented postmodern social world in which, following the decomposition of the metaphysics of Eurocentric temporality, many people have only partial, photographic access to their history, and these isolated strands of history entangle themselves until they are finally set into motion in a collapsing universe.” (Carren Irr)

“The snake didn’t care about the uranium tailings; humans had desecrated only themselves with the mine, not the earth. Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her.” (Almanac of the Dead 762)

Through out Almanac of the Dead there is a severe confusion of temporal realities. The narrative presents five versions of “Darien” or Being-in-time mythic: linear, revolutionary, aristocratic, and relativistic. The aim is estrangement and alienation from the mundane and generic use of only linear story telling. Such estrangement challenges the reader to question place and history. In this way, the story cognitively maps the lives of several people in an all encompassing portrait of both time, space, and life.

Functioning much in the same vein as a jigsaw puzzle, Almanac of the Dead is not fully coherent nor understood until the final page. Each character has, on one hand, a singular life and can be superficially understood as such. Further, the novel could have been ten satisfactory novellas. A coked out blond searching for her child, a homeless vet fighting big government, a rags to riches mexican businessman drowning in wealth and corruption. Yet all these lives come together to build a much larger literary mosaic. Lives may be individual but life is not. Indeed, the narrative focuses on no single life but rather is a meta commentary on human society (a very critical one at that).

This greater web of historical and relative relations asks the reader to question his own present. While the reader may live in the mundane day to day, he also weaves a complex pattern through all of human existence. This higher web of interaction is almost entirely forgotten in the modern world. Much to the blame for this rests on the individuals fear of his own insignificance. Another reason lies in the avoidance of guilt for what day to day action causes. Almanac of the Dead entices the reader to face mortality and causality. In doing so, the reader may join the greater flow of energy without shame or trepidation. As well, when the mosaic is finalized, the reader receives a clear message of the novel underlying theme.

In encountering personal insignificance, the reader additionally comes face to face with the sacredness of the earth. Land is eternal. It bears the scars of history not for a single generation but always. It is so much larger than the individual or the nation, even the race of man. Earth defies ownership. Instead, land is borrowed for a lifetime. A life is temporary and until the permanence of death is conquered, the land is greater than any individual or collection of individuals. That is at least what the Almanac wants us to consider.

Nations and Groups

“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely...We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines...We don’t see any border” (Silko 216).

“Nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it” (Anderson).

Native American society, an example of a cultural system preceding Nationalism, is characterized by its lack of borders. “We know where we belong on this earth.” Native American society, unlike western, nationalistic society, is not defined by location. Land is understood, but not part of societies definition. Nationalism needs to be understood in light of this because it is defined by exactly this characteristic. Nationalistic societies are defined chiefly by their location. Native American society is defined by group bonds and ancestry and history. In “The Almanac of the Dead,” we can move about in space and time because the group is not limited by these dimensions. In a nationalistic society, leaving the bounds of the nation would take us outside its group. Therefore we can see how simply Nationalism relates to preceding cultural systems. Nationalism artificially created a bond within its society, creating a united group regardless of the actual connections of its members.

Waiting for Death

"As the title indicated, the book is very much bout the dead; it is set in the desert, an environment where 'the dead did not rot or dissolve' - a place where people are simply 'passing time' while they wait for death (64). In this context, the dead are both bodies that have outlived their social significance and ghosts of those who died before their agendas were complete" (Irr 225).

In The Almanac of the Dead, it seems that those around the dead and thinking of the dead immediately dissociate the corpse from the person that once was. The characters, and therefore the author, treat those who die as though their spirit or self immediately departs from their body. However, this death, though a seemingly large transition, does not particularly affect those who die and those around the dead. As Irr paraphrases, these characters are "simply ' passing time while they wait for death.'" And once they die, they are treated somewhat of a nonchalance where "the dead are [...] bodies that have outlived their social significance." Simple as that. Each of the deaths in the novel are announced, explained, reasoned, and then everyone moves on fairly quickly. With Seese's reaction to Eric's death, with La Escapia's reaction to Bartolomeo's death, and with Alegria's reaction to Menardo's death, the reaction time is consistently brief. When Alegria goes to see Menardo's body after his accidental death, Silko narrates, "Menardo was lying on his back covered now with his own shirt and suit coat. Alegria approached slowly. Poor silly man! [...] She wept for herself, not the fool Menardo. Menardo had been worth much more to her alive than dead [...]" (508). Alegria quickly comes to terms with her husband's death when she realizes what has happened and she recognizes her new dilemmas due to his departure even quicker. Everyone is solely concerned with themselves so much that close deaths do not barely affect them.
After Max Blue's accident, he lies in the hospital and reflects on his views about the death he has nearly succumbed to many times, "Max knew there was nothing after death. Nothingness and silence. The silence and the emptiness were darkness. Max had recovered consciousness after the place crash, but he had never forgotten the darkness and the silence that flowed endlessly. There were no devils or Jesus. Death was the dark, deep earth that blotted out the light of a vast blue sky Max called life" (Silko 353). His views on death are very matter-of-fact, simple, and final that he even goes on to say that he "believed killing a man was doing him a favor" (Silko 354). This view of death and its benefits is not at all unrelated with how other characters deal with the this same concept. In the desert setting Silko sets up, every character is forced to fight for themselves, whether it be a relationship, a career, or a lifestyle, until their "'passing time'" is over.

The Global Imagined Community

What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogenous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measure by clock and calendar.

(Anderson 24)

In this part of his essay, Anderson explains the concept of simultaneity-cross-time, the frame in which modern humanity operates according to man-made concepts of time and space. In an ever internationalizing world, this concept rings truer since people of one nation are more aware of, and affected by, the fact that citizens of another are moving about, living, much the same as they are living at the same time. Soon after this passage, Anderson uses an example of the reading of newspapers internationally, which particularly illuminated this concept for me: many of us wake up in the morning and read the newspaper (or at least encounter some form of global media with or without intending to via the Internet or the public), and are thus unintentionally brought in to the global imagined community. These forms of media connect us to the media-informed of other nations in our daily, ritualistic “imagining” of the world as we see it through news headlines – someone in China might be reading about Obama’s most recent stopover in Asia in Chinese and with a bias different from my own, but both of us have formulated an opinion on what this event means and are now connected in our understanding and participation in the global imagined community. This community may be imagined, or “marked not by prefiguring or fulfillment” since we do not always intend to create it, but it is nevertheless powerful in its ability to unconsciously link the world.

When one moves back and looks at the larger picture of the various stories in Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead, one can see the unconscious and inevitable connections Silko depicts across cultures, nations, and peoples. Sterling, for instance, is hired to protect the Laguna tribe from the prying of the American film crew that is constantly violating Native customs; but, it is a losing battle from the start as the tribe has overestimated Sterling’s knowledge of modern culture and underestimated the film crew, i.e. the pervasiveness of American consumerist culture. In the face of a younger generation with less interest in its own Native culture and an increasingly impeaching American culture, the Tribal Council exiles Sterling less out of reason, than out of a need of a scapegoat for the loss and doom of “the Indian way”. Sterling comments on the diminution of Native culture and ties it to the history of African tribes:

…Sterling had begun to realize that people he had been used to calling “Mexicans” were really remnants of different kinds of Indians. But what had remained of what was Indian was in appearance only – the skin and hair and the eyes. The cheekbones and nose like eagles and hawks. They had lost contact with their tribes and their ancestors’ worlds…Indians flung across the world forever separated from their tribes and from their ancestral lands – that kind of think had been happening to human beings since the beginning of time. African tribes had been sold into slavery all over the Earth.

(Silko 88)

It is interesting that Silko uses African tribes in comparison to these Native American tribes because it further highlights the brutality and effectiveness of American (presumably white) culture in disintegrating tribal, community and land-based lifestyles. The demand for slaves during America’s colonial period, another form of American consumerism, brutally eradicated, or weakened, many African tribal cultures because these cultures were easy to impose upon and exploit. Both examples demonstrate the negative effects of the global community Anderson described: the assimilation, which means to say eradication, of materially weaker cultures (those that are tribal or technologically undeveloped) into a greater, materialistic, pervasive Western culture.

Fences, Borders, and Artefacts

The first and most important matter in Almanac of the Dead were the examinations of suffering in the characters through vivid images, chopped up like it was splayed out on an editor's table ready to be montaged in a movie. The grandfather and grandmother figures of Sterling's tribe, Seese's dreams of her child, the syringes and pill containers in the kitchen. It reminds me of the passage in which "The creation of these artefacts...was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted... to a great variety of social terrains" (Anderson 4). These images for the most part are not in themselves the artefacts, but the result of them. Maybe the artefacts are the Native American lands, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the Drug War that gave birth to each character and their relation to what seems like a shared national suffering.

I was especially fascinated with Silko's style as she recounts Stirling's past. The anguish expressed was such a difference from a western, national view of Indian tribes' traditions as antiquated and foolish. Suddenly the sterile museum displays become atrocities, sacrilegious, and the soul is forcefully tugged from the elder who views this. The simple act of the item becoming the artefact is forcefully transplanted from the Native American culture into "modernity".

I also took this into account when I considered the criminals in Stirling's magazines as often being of Native American descent. That these people somewhat became museum pieces themselves as a representation of the borderlessness combating the "nation-ness" of the United States was almost like a more modernized image of the Native Americans themselves. If "is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson 6), then Silko's lack or presence of boders in Almanac of the Dead presents an interesting case study. There is the stifling of Tuscan, the Ranch, but the structure of the novel itself - with it's winding narratives outside of the Ranch, many different viewpoints, and jumping from one to the other fairly quickly juxtaposes this prison-like environment with another sort of spirit. I would very much enjoy exploring the possibility that the drug inclusion in the novel also served as a point to contrast another extension of the borderless principle.

Imaginary Boundaries

"These most precious sacred figures had been stolen. The museum of the Laboratory of Anthropology had received and was in the possession of stolen property. The white man's own laws said this. Not even an innocent buyer got title of ownership to stolen property" (Silko 33).

In Almanac of the Dead, Silko plays on the theme of people of European descent being nationalist thieves, stealing the land of the Americas from its native people and struggling (and failing) to live in harmony with the earth: "From their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born... The ancestors had had called Europeans "the orphan people"... They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them" (258). White characters in Almanac have a propensity for insane drug addiction, murder, theft, and kidnapping. Seese's narrative is tainted and confused by her often-drug-induced state, as the reader is swept through her emotional responses without clear explanation or even a rational thought.

So what is Silko trying to say? It seems pretty clear that she is pointing out that through Europeans' attempt to create nations and draw up borders, dividing the earth that in fact belongs to all, they have lost any semblance of spiritual connection to the earth, and in turn, have fragmented the indigenous identity and forfeited anyone's chance of finding inner-peace. The fact of the matter is, as Silko and the Native American people see it, there are no national boundaries, only those that we create ourselves. Indeed, as Anderson points out with a quote by Hugh Seton-Waton, "Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no 'scientific definition' of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists" (Anderson 3).

Why does this phenomenon exist, though? Anderson goes on to cite Tom Nairn in order to explain that nationalistic inclinations are built, though pathologically so, into the societal-developmental mentality of humans, "as inescapable as neurosis in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world and largely incurable" (5). As humans flounder in the sea of doubt and ambiguity of locating ourselves, cognitively mapping our location in the universe, we naturally fall back on these somewhat primal habits of dividing and separating, creating borders and grouping into "nations."

Imaginary Lines and the Mediators between Heaven and Earth

In Anderson’s Cultural Roots, he explains the differences in the perception of society in the past and present. One of the cultural systems which he mentions is that of “The Religious Community”, which along with the dynastic realm held back the development of nationalism at an earlier date. Anderson sees the three main religions of Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism as creating a world, “imaginable largely through the medium of sacred language and written script,” (13). And further goes on to say that,

“The fundamental conceptions about ‘social groups’ were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and horizontal. The astonishing power of the papacy in its noon day is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven. (The awesomeness of excommunication reflects this cosmology)”

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, were are shown various Native American societies, that while at first glance seem to have embraced nationalist thought in the wake of Western hegemony, on closer examination, still exhibit either out right, or at least a yearning for the pre-nationalistic world explained by Anderson. Specifically we can look at the Almanac’s portrayal of Native Americans through the lens of Anderson’s Religious Community.

First of all, the idea of sacred language and script is shown by the representation of the Almanac itself, a collection of ancient Mayan codexes and latin translations that surely only the mysterious twins Zeta and Lecha can understand completely. But, the “sacred language” could also be the mystical powers possessed by the usually female, elderly, Native American women; Lecha’s connection to the dead, the Eskimo woman’s ability to crash planes, Zeta’s ability to communicate with snakes, etc. With these abilities, deeply rooted in the religious beliefs of Native Americans, they are comparable to the papal elite Anderson mentions, because like the medieval papacy, are able to mediate “between vernacular and latin”, or combining their mystical powers with modern technology and criminal schemes. The Eskimo woman uses the televisions to crash planes, and Lecha uses her abilities to make money on the daytime talk show circuit. These woman are shown to be at the top of the Native American society, or at least those garnered the most respect, fear, or awe. They truly do, “mediate between earth and heaven”.

Secondly, we are shown that the Native Americans of Almanac are not “boundary-oriented, and horizontal”. Calabazas says to Root;

“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely...We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines...We don’t see any border.” (216, Silko)

The modern ideas of nationalistic boundaries hold no wait because in Calabazas eyes they are “imaginary lines.” What is important is ones place in the earth; that is what is real. Not the “horizontal” Western imperialist view, spreading out, gobbling everything flatly from all directions. Calabazas and other Native Americans prefer their “Vertical” view. They constantly have to be aware of their place among “the four worlds below this world.” (121), not only concerning themselves with the horizon.

Michael Randolph

I’m not really sure what it says about this class that the book that is closest to our true, modern-day lives is filled with incredibly dysfunctional characters. Nearly every character we meet is over-sexualized, emotionally distraught, whacked out of their minds, or mentally distant (if not a combination of two or three of those things). The interesting part about Almanac of the Dead is that though it is set in a world similar to true modern surroundings, everything about it seems to push readers away and create distance between the audience and the characters. The beginning of the book’s chapters are in a removed, distant third person limited point of view that enables readers to access the thoughts of the emotion, and yet still not be given access to their inner thoughts; the narrator still acts as a intermediary. Examples of these chapters include Exile and The Ranch, following Sterling, and TV Talk Show Psychic following Seese. The chapters switch from one point of view to another sharply, jumping into new characters without giving a background on them. In the beginning of the novel, we are both there, present in the time and minds of the characters, and removed, separated by unfamiliarity and abrupt introductions.

The style choice functions as putting audiences in the mind of Seese; as she begins to reclaim sobriety, so does the audience through improved clarity and detail in her thoughts and experience. Even after the novel begins to stylistically lighten up, the retold vignettes still describe incredibly removed behavior. For example, the retelling of Eric’s suicide and David’s reaction reflect an extremely impersonal and clinical approach to living.

The larger meaning of the distance between characters and their emotions imply a larger crisis in the realm of race relations. How can characters who are so extremely flawed relate to others when they can’t even understand themselves? When their own emotions are so alien, how can they appreciate or interact with people of drastically different backgrounds? Are Almanac’s drugged out characters even worth figuring out?

Truth-Language of the Almanac

In the passages from "Imagined Communities", Benedict Anderson describes the way that sacred languages held together classical communities of the sort that faded as nationalism rose to prominence. The power he ascribes to languages is illustrated and becomes an integral part of "Almanac of the Dead". Native American culture is characterized as a traditional community, where language plays a vital role in keeping the culture alive, particularly in the form of the novel's namesake, the almanac.

The almanac Yoeme passed down to Zeta and Lecha is in the form of loose papers and notebooks covered in writing and drawings. To an outside observer unversed in the Native American lore the sisters grew up with, the contents of the almanac would be nonsense. In this way, the text operates as a "truth-language" just like "Church Latin, Qur'anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese" in that it determines, in part, the membership of the group (Anderson 14). For example, Menardo chose to ignore his Indian ancestry and his grandfather's stories and so is not versed in the sacred language. In contrast, since Zeta and Lecha were very close to Yoeme, they learned the language and claimed their membership in the group.

It is also significant that the drawings of snakes were so important to Yoeme. According to Zeta, "the notebook of the snakes was the key to understanding all the rest of the old almanac" (Silko 134). Similarly, Anderson states that the vital difference between the sacred languages and other more modern languages was "the non-arbitrariness of the sign" and the belief that all the symbols were "emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it" (14). The snakes are important because the drawings themselves mean something and do not just stand in as representations for an unrelated idea. The power of the almanac requires its reader to understand the depth of meaning behind a seemingly simple drawing.

"Almanac of the Dead" also illustrates Anderson's idea that "the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven" (14-15). This explanation, when applied to the women in "Almanac" who used Native American languages to evoke a specific mystical occurrence, explains their power. Lecha discovered what happened to murdered people and exerted control over others' lives using what we are lead to believe are traditional Native American methods. When discussing their work on the almanac, Lecha tells Zeta, "once the notebooks are transcribed, I will figure out how to use the old almanac. Then we will foresee the months and years to come- everything" (Silko 137). Lecha truly believes in the almanac's power, the power instilled in mere pages by the words inscribed on them.

According to Anderson, "the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized" (19). This fall also applies to the language of the almanac. In the past, as described by Silko, the Indians of the Southwest United States and Mexico was divided into villages with similarities in culture. However, in the portions of "Almanac of the Dead" focusing on Menardo, the reader becomes familiar with the characterization of Native Americans as territorial revolutionaries, desiring an overthrow of the government to reclaim their land. While they may maintain their knowledge of traditional culture and lore, their mindset has become one of nationalism. They turned away from the power of their language to the power of guns and explosives, and in the process, lost a vital part of their culture.