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A visionary reckoning with prophecy, possession, and the grammar of liberation

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.