Friday, July 14, 2017
Melville Room (University of Glasgow)
As a point of departure for my talk, I draw attention to the 1991 novel The Almanac of the Dead by the Native American writer, Leslie Marmon Silko. In the closing sections of that novel, Silko presents readers with a prophetic vision articulated through the character of a Mayan woman who can see into the future: “People should go about their daily routines,” this Mayan woman says, “because already the great shift of human populations on the continents was under way, and there was nothing human beings could do to stop it. […] No fences or walls, would stop [… those who were coming]; guns and bombs would not stop them. They had no fear of death; they were comfortable with their ancestors' spirits. They would come by the millions.” (Silko 735-36). They would tax the artificially constructed boarders of the nation-state, and they would redefine national, political and cultural identities. Some 25 years after the publication of Silko’s novel, this image of mass migration is striking, I argue, not only for its prescient awareness of the population shifts we now see unfolding on a global scale, but also for its recognition of those masses not as a “crisis” but as an unacknowledged and unstoppable political force – indeed as a potent and seemingly invisible vanguard that, while not conforming to popular conceptions of revolutionary fervor, is nonetheless in the process of radically transforming the U.S. and European political order.
