Otherwise, Revolution!: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead by Rebecca Tillett (review)

Rebecca Tillett's thorough and thoughtful Otherwise, Revolution!: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is at once a meaningful intervention in literary scholarship on Silko and an important addition to larger cultural conversations concerning the intensification of inequality, injustice, ecological disaster, and misogynistic violence that marks our global zeitgeist. Through the lens of "Revolucíon," Tillett discusses Almanac's exploration of relationships and relationality (or a lack thereof) in a time of emerging technocratic and kleptocratic hierarchies that further estrange us from reciprocal relationships with the Earth and our fellow beings (14). She deftly employs Glen Coulthard's concept of "grounded normativity" to focus on Almanac's insistence on privileging "modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge," as a means of combatting complicity in increasingly dire social circumstances (qtd. in Tillet 17). She traces the "profound interconnections" between Almanac's plotlines and corresponding "extra-textual concerns of social and environmental justice movements" (19); in doing so, Tillett identifies the persistent socioeconomic myths underlying the challenges we faced at the time of the novel's publication and still face in our current moment, when many of Silko's more unsettling prophecies have come into literal or symbolic fruition.

Divided into two parts, "Oppression and Dispossession" and "Resistance and Revolucíon," Otherwise, Revolution! seeks first to diagnose our chronic social maladies caused by late capitalism, and then to explore how Indigenous worldviews and the resurgent, transnational uprisings of Native people and their allies are our only means of preventing further economic, social, and natural disaster (19). The chapters of "Oppression and Dispossession" intellectually lean into, rather than tiptoe around, the more depraved and vile acts committed by the novel's elitist and profoundly amoral antagonists (referred to as "Destroyers"), who wield their wealth and unchecked power against vulnerable communities (31-32). Tillett makes clear the horrifying logic that governs these "death-worlds" and propels the actions of corrupt global elites; that rather than being the imaginings of a 'hysterical' writer, they are the logical conclusions of "vampire capitalism" and its retinue of power structures. She elucidates the effects of heteropatriarchy that turn bodies into a series of transactions, and academic institutions that dismiss Indigenous worldviews of interconnectivity in favor of "dissective scientific and medical discourses," which tout their "objectivity" while reifying sexism and racism in their methodologies (91, 93). These chapters make legible the extreme and graphic violence committed against vulnerable bodies in the text, not as an argument of "art for art's sake," but as a rubric for understanding the felt impacts of the "slow violence" of capitalism that permeates every aspect of our lived existence until we are inured to its worst predilections. By continually divorcing ourselves from one another and the Earth, we succumb to the logic of the "death-world," in which the unimaginable becomes rationalized.

The second half of the book, entitled "Resistance and Revolucíon," contains chapters dedicated to articulating the "alternative narratives" found in Almanac, which are "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" (120). While these chapters contain the same level of rigorous literary analysis, they also intervene in contemporary discussions of coalition-building, contending that Indigenous epistemologies should be at the forefront of movements working to combat climate change and global inequality. Noting Silko's refrain of the "disappearance of all things European," a line that alienated mainstream critics of the novel, Tillett clarifies that Silko is not advocating for the erasure of Euramerican people; instead, Silko is inviting settler society to participate in the "return to the cultural and spiritual values of Indigenous cosmopolitics" that will undo the damage of "death-world" hierarchies (121). Tillett explores the alliances present in the novel, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples become increasingly connected by stories...