Border Thinking in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: The Repudiation of a Colonial Time-Space Frame of Reference
Walter Mignolo, historically a theorist of Latin American border theories, stipulates, “Native Americans in the United States are in a border position not because they moved but because the world moved to them” (Local Histories 72). This paper expands Mignolo’s stipulation and examines the Native American reservation as a border space that allows for transformation and resistance in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. The borderland I refer to throughout this essay is the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Located in New Mexico, the reservation represents a border space that “grates” and “bleeds” against dominant western culture and the dogma of modernity, which allows those who inhabit the border to create a space that resists colonial violence (Anzaldúa 24). Those dwelling in the border are in the unique position to “[delink] from hegemonic epistemology (‘absolute knowledge’)” and reclaim the histories and knowledge production devalued and denied under the dominant culture (Mignolo, Local Histories xvi-xvii). As a decolonial strategy, border thinking illuminates the border as a space for emergence for oppressed populations. Moreover, working as a form of epistemic decolonization, border thinking subverts a hegemonic colonial history that facilitates the coloniality of knowledge. I argue that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony reimagines the Laguna Pueblo Native American border as a place of resistance and a space for the convergence of different cultures to create a Native futurity and assert the necessity of a Native American frame of reference. By reimaging the borderland as a space outside of the colonial imaginary, Silko posits the vitality and continued becoming of Native peoples outside of an imposed colonial hierarchy.
Gabriella Wilson is an MA Candidate at Rutgers University.
Forms of Justice 