Racism as Delusion: A Buddhist Perspective

The powerful novel Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko combines several uncomfortable truths from the perspective of a young Native American who has returned home after World War II: the theft of Native American land, the manipulations that set poor whites against poor Indians (among others) and the effects of these lies on the hearts of white people, who tried and still try to fill up their hollowness with money, technology and patriotic war. However, as Silko emphasizes, the lies do not work. Not only have we white folk been fooling ourselves, but we also know that we have been fooling ourselves, and the consequences of our self-deceptions continue to haunt all of us. This essay is an attempt to say more about how that collective delusion functions—in particular, to understand the emptiness that patriotism never quite fills up, the hollowness that wealth and consumerism cannot glut. In order to do this, I will offer a (not “the”) Buddhist perspective, so we begin with some basic Buddhist teachings, which are quite different from the Abrahamic (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) traditions more familiar to most of us.

Imaginar otro mundo con la literatura: la indigenización de la modernidad en «Almanac of the Dead» de Leslie Marmon Silko

Keywords: decoloniality, modernity, literary imagination, Almanac of the Dead

American Literature and the Long Downturn

American Literature and the Long Downturn argues that the economic crisis of the 1970s established the conditions for a contemporary literary form: neoliberal apocalypse. Apocalyptic writing appears when groups perceive themselves as threatened and hope seems foreclosed. Focusing on James Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace, Neoliberal Apocalypse reveals how contemporary American experience has been shaped by the tendency to imagine our present as apocalyptic.

MENELUSUR TRADISI: RENAISSANCE DALAM NATIVE AMERIKA DAN PERSPEKTIFNYA TERHADAP KEMATIAN DALAM KARYA LESLIE MARMON SILKO

Pemaknaan terhadap kematian dalam kehidupan manusia biasanya ditangkap hanya dalam tataran kematian fisik sebagai sebuah fenomena alam. Sementara itu, tradisi dan budaya hadir dengan potensi signifikan untuk memengaruhi dan membentuk adat serta protokol upacara kematian. Dalam konteks ini, Native Amerika memandang konsep kematian sebagai bagian dari tradisi dan warisan adat. Namun demikian, proses kolonisasi dan asimilasi dalam tatanan sosial Native Amerika telah mencapai sengketa yang rumit. Terkait dengan pergerakan renaissance dalam kehidupan Native Amerika, bias yang terjadi terhadap perspektif dalam memandang kematian diurai melalui penelusuran ujung konsep dari kematian itu sendiri yang sangat erat berkaitan dengan tradisi Native Amerika. Mekanisme dekolonisasi terhadap konsep kematian sebagai sebuah self-determination terhadap identitas kelompok sosial Native Amerika diambil dari refleksi karya sastra karangan Leslie Marmon Silko. Kajian ini menggunakan konsep analisis wacana dalam paradigma poskolonialisme. Manifestasi atas hasil penelitian merupakan: 1) Perspektif terhadap kematian menurut lensa Native Amerika dipandang sebagai tame death. 2) Kematian dipandang sebagai sebuah mekanisme penyeimbang kehidupan sosial jika ditarik dari nilai-nilai kehidupan kelompok Native Amerika. 3) Protokol upacara kematian dilaksanakan dalam sistem tribal ditemukan sebagai sebuah resistensi Native Amerika dalam menolak asimilasi dan dominasi kulit Putih. Hal tersebut didukung adanya sebuah gerakan determinasi dan artikulasi identitas kelompok Native Amerika. Kata kunci: Kematian, Tradisi, Renaissance dalam Native Amerika The subtle meaning of death on people’s life tends to generally depict the idea of natural phenomenon. Meanwhile, tradition and culture exist within their significant potency to influence the nurture of death customs and protocols. In this context, Native American deal with the concept of death as a particular tradition of their tribal legacy. However, colonization and assimilation process on their social order had transformed the Native American perspective on death into an advancement dispute.Concomitant to Native American renaissance movement, bias on the perspective of death is elucidated by tracing the root of death’s concept which is emanated from Native American tradition. The mechanism of decolonizing death’s perspective against White’s concept is represented in Native American literary works by Leslie Marmon Silko. As a consequence, the research employs critical discourse analysis on post-colonialism paradigm.The results of the work manifest: (1) Perspective on death through Native American lens considered as a tame death. (2) Death additionally scrutinized as social balance mechanism according to Native American value. At last, (3) Funeral protocols performed in tribal system essentially expounds the resistance of Native American people against the assimilation and White domination. Keywords: Death, Tradition, Renaissance, Native American Movement

The Common, Force, and the Capitalocene

Different as they are, Fredric Jameson’s “universal army” and Bruno Latour’s “Theater of Negotiations” both implicitly address the failure of a sufficiently large self-organized “common force” (à la Leslie Marmon Silko) to arise and repair capitalogenic ecological and social depredations today. Reading Jameson and Latour together offers a way toward affirmative transformation by exposing the need (“horizontal” ideals notwithstanding) for force put into critical tension with common effort to spur the ecosocial planetary repair humans— especially the privileged—are failing to do in a timely way, or at a sufficient scale, today.

Radical Interdisciplinarity

This essay delineates the concept of radical interdisciplinarity, the use of methodologies that combine traditional scholarship with that which is not traditionally considered either scholarship or even part of an academic discipline—specifically poetry and other creative arts. The author describes radical interdisciplinarity as building on the hybrid methodologies of women of color authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Michelle Cliff, who often combined memoir with fiction or poetry. The essay itself includes examples of radical interdisciplinarity in the form of a critical biomythography that weaves together scholarly analysis and poetry related to the author’s current research on the jamette women of nineteenth-century Trinidad.