Narratives of Global Capital and the Spirits of Anti-colonial Resistance in Silko’s<i>Almanac of the Dead</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I consider how the inheritances of secular modernity condition and constrain forms of cosmopolitan and Marxist critique. I analyse Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) as a text which theorises anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance by materialising spiritual resurgence. Almanac blurs the boundaries between materiality and spirituality and reveals the limits of the language of globalisation for reading the text's anti-colonial gesture. I argue that Silko contests frameworks of secular modernity in two central ways: first, by disrupting accounts of linear time, and second by de-centring the role of human agency in revolution. Drawing on original archival research from the Leslie Marmon Silko Papers, I show how Almanac is a genre-defying text in active conversation with late Cold War imperialist conflicts in South America and Marxist theories of revolution. The political force of Silko's novel, however, lies not only in its representation of late capital in the settler colonial nation-state, but in its capacity to imagine other worlds beyond the strictures of colonial modernity. Challenging conceptions of the autonomous subject of agency, and disrupting the progressive temporality of resistance movements, Silko's novel proposes new critical imaginaries for thinking dissent in communion with the sacred.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".