The Aesthetics of Resistance in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

 This essay examines the complex interaction between the poetics of postmodern fiction and the politics of commitment in Leslie Marmon Silko's first novel. The paradoxical questioning and reinforcement of the postmodern canon in the novel's encoding of a Native American literary aesthetics is discussed in relation to the transnational paradigm. The interaction between the tribal ecological and ontological vision on the one hand, and the aesthetics of postmodernism and of environmentalism on the other inscribe the novel's complex enactment of a cross-cultural matrix that joins the celebration of the "local" and the tribal to a highlighting of the transnational.