ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/010111-16© 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725012005680 0 tribalism, globalism trial and post-industrial modernity. 3 From this perspective, then, Silko’s tribalism explicitly refutes a nationalist iconography in the United States, which at least since Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia has insisted that indigenous, tribal populations and tribal cultures are unable to withstand the transition into the time and space of the modern nation, even into such a pastoralized version of a modern (rationalized) spatial order as the one embodied in Jefferson’s yeoman farmer. Under the twin signs of US nationalism and imperialism, the tribal is destined for assimilation, removal, or extermination (generally coded as the voluntary passage of the noble savage into oblivion). Strictly anterior to the nation-state, the tribal passes, as if of its own accord, to the nation’s farthest margins, or frontiers.

In Alamanc, the distinction between the progressive temporality of the metropolitan center and the stasis of the tribal periphery (“reservation”) dissolves, and the reader finds herself tracking the movements of tribal subalterns across a decentered global space, so regularly cited as a defining feature of postmodernity and late capitalist organization. Yet for Almanac’s protagonists, as for Masao Miyoshi and other theorists of post-industrial capital (such as Caplan and Grewal, or Ahmad), the decentering of global space is governed by social and economic practices that are anything but post-colonial. Attracted to zones of non-unionized labor, of below-subsistence wages, and of minimal environmental regulation–conditions which it therefore seeks to perpetuate, rather than redress–mobile capital has no stake in conferring the promised benefits of modernity on formerly colonized peoples whose underdevelopment is colonialism’s legacy. 4 Moreover, the tendency toward the spatialization of native people’s historical difference that marks the nationalist/imperialist imaginary (a tendency that converts anterior time into marginal space) is amplified rather than diminished within an emergent, post-national imaginary that codes the most profound discontinuities in material circumstances and experiential discourses as (merely) local variations in an integrated global space.