A Theory for Cultural Resistance: The Cases of L. M. Silko’s Ceremony and L. Erdrich’s Tracks

Abstract

ABSTRACT One critical issue facing subaltern cultures is how they react to the process of cultural assimilation. This article aims to analyze the characters in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, to see how they interpret and react to the “social norms.” The novels offer counter discourses that try to resist, negate, and put in suspense the nodal points of the dominant culture. When exposed to the hegemonic discourse, the subalterns also construct and re-territorialize the significance of the nodal points. The two novelists use elements from their own cultures in the form of memories, storytelling, songs, etc., to impose their own definitions on the floating signifiers. Contradictions caused by the process create fault lines that will destabilize the dominant discourse’s nodal points and reformulate the hegemonic discourse’s rules. The resisting characters in both novels remember the residual elements in which the dominant discourse is questioned and negated. Strategies of resistance in both novels relatively follow the same path: the residual elements create fault lines deconstructing the nodal points of ideological discourse. This process will make us aware of other possibilities of signification in the field of discursivity, opening up space and time for articulating new elements.