A bold, experimental intervention in literary and theoretical discourse of colonialism and diaspora, The Web of Differing Versions engages with Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 Almanac of the Dead as literature, prophecy, and philosophy. Reid Gómez makes “The Indian Connection” that Silko prophesizes—Land Back!—and offers a prescient response to Silko’s enduring question: who has spiritual possession of the Américas?
Realizing the great capacity of Black and Native studies, Gómez crafts a visionary mode of scholarship that resists acknowledging conceptual, political, spiritual, formal, or linguistic borders. Rather than comparing or separating, she demonstrates how to stop telling things apart: Black|Indian, slavery|colonization, and writing|translation. Gómez shifts focus from racialized identities to the prophesied world itself, working with music, literature, and language to elaborate the connections that exist between racialized bodies, land, and sea as she emphasizes the ubiquity of escape, revolt, and beauty/hózhǫ́.
A theoretical composition, this book enacts a practice of re-visioning that uses Silko’s Almanac to challenge the limits of thought, language, and the very idea of scholarship. Attending the multiplicity of time into times, past into pasts, future into futures, The Web of Differing Versions offers a new grammar for a shared and violent world.
PRAISE FOR THE WEB OF DIFFERING VERSIONS
"This book is a fugue of entangled voices, a genre-fluid refusal of the violence that would sever Black from Indian, story from method, or freedom from relation. Here, we dwell in the lush thicket of ‘always together; always told apart,’ where story uncoils as a loom of new worlds—worlds spun from the shimmering, unruly threads of our collective becoming."—Marquis Bey, author of Black Trans Feminism
"The Web of Differing Versions offers a strikingly original and productively disorienting exploration of Indigenous (and Black) literature and life. The high degree of experimentation in this mesmerizing text invites readers to enter with openness as Reid Gómez lovingly weaves stories, songs, translations, and citations around a core analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Gómez arrives at an exhilarating writing style—literary exegesis—that will challenge and inspire all who enter here."—Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reid Gómez is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, American Indian studies, and social, cultural, and critical theory at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
For more information, visit the book's webpage:https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919757/the-web-of-differing-versions/
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