"Human Debris": Border Politics, Body Parts, and the Reclamation of the Americas in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Ann Folwell Stanford shows how Leslie Marmon Silko uses bodies and body parts as symbols of an unruly society in Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. Drawing on Mayan beliefs and prophecies as well as on contemporary social realities, Silko probes medicine's entanglements in the profit motive that make it simultaneously vulnerable and culpable. A characteristic Euro-American force inextricably linked to the oppression and domination of the have-nots, medicine becomes a governing image and one of the ideological engines behind this work.