“Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things”: Revisiting Betonie’s Waste-Lands in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2014.27.01Keywords:
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Urban Indians, Neocolonialism, Cultural recyclingAbstract
This article explores the socio-political background that led to widespread Native American urban relocation in the period following World War II – a historical episode which is featured in Leslie Marmon Silko’s acclaimed novel Ceremony (1977). Through an analysis of the recycling, reinterpreting practices carried out by one of Ceremony’s memorable supporting characters, Navajo healer Betonie, Silko’s political aim to interrogate the state of things and to re-value Native traditions in a context of ongoing relations of coloniality is made most clear. In Silko’s novel, Betonie acts as an organic intellectual who is able to identify and challenge the 1950s neocolonial structure that forced Native American communities to either embrace hegemonic practices and lifestyles or else be condemned to cultural reification and abject poverty. Through his waste-collecting and recycling activities, Betonie develops alternative solutions that go beyond a merely spiritual or epistemological dimension of life and materially intervene in the social text. The margins of 1950s urban sprawl functioned as repositories of indigenous cultural and intellectual capital that was being consciously, actively transformed by Native agents such as him. Thus, through Ceremony’s medicine man, Leslie Silko criticizes disempowering attitudes of victimhood and Native self-shame while vindicating indigenous historical territories and unconventional political strategies. She also anticipates the liminal practices of material and cultural recycling we see in countless Western cities today, in the aftermath of the most recent world economic crisis.Downloads
Downloads
Statistics
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors publishing in this journal agree to the following terms:
1 Copyright. Authors retain copyright, but cede non-exclusive exploitation rights (reproduction, distribution, public communication and transformation) to the journal and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the licence set out in clause 2. Authors are free to enter into additional agreements for non-exclusive distribution of works published in this journal, as long as the fact that the manuscripts were first published in this journal is acknowledged.
© The authors.
2 Licence. Works are published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, the terms and conditions of which are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Under this licence, third parties are allowed to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially) the material, as long as its authorship and initial publication in this journal (Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, University of Alicante, DOI of the work) are acknowledged, a link to the licence is provided and the fact of whether or not any changes were made is stated.
3 Self-archiving policy. Authors are encouraged to disseminate their work online in order to promote earlier circulation and dissemination of their work and possibly get more citations and achieve higher impact within the scientific and academic community, under the following conditions:
Authors are not allowed to upload preprint or postprint versions (respectively, versions before and after peer-review and acceptance for publication) of their work to an institutional or thematic repository, their own website, etc. prior to publication, only the final published article (publisher's version).