Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and the end of the new world

At the first ‘Apocalypse: Imagining the End’ Global Conference in 2012, Michael E. Harkin presented a timely paper that built on European misunderstandings of the so-called Mayan Apocalypse. Harkin provocatively argued that the cultural structure of conquest and colonisation led to more than just the projection of Christian millenarianism onto indigenous people: for him, the ‘annihilation of self and other’ has become a necessary ‘part of the practice and symbolism of the post-Columbian world.’ This paper runs with Harkin’s idea by examining the peculiar brand of millenarianism that emerges in Leslie Marmon Silko’s prophecy-novel Almanac of the Dead (1991). In this, I use Norman Cohn’s definition of millenarianism to ascertain how Silko critiques visions of the future that depend on a total break with the past and the land, particularly capitalist visions; for Silko, any such vision is hubristic and ultimately self-defeating. I go on to discuss how Silko cultivates a type of de-totalised millenarian aesthetic that prioritises connection with the past and the Earth, and which in turn opens up a discursive space for a political radicalism and environmental justice that will bring about the end of the colonial ‘New World.’