Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne Stewart (review)

In her reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Anne Stewart observes that, “The golf course is an ur-site of colonial excess and capitalist venality” (133). Beyond its narrative function in Silko’s novel, the golf course is indeed a signifier not only of colonial excess, but also of state violence against Indigenous peoples. In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, led to a 78-day standoff between the Canadian army and Mohawk Warriors protecting a sacred burial ground referred to as “The Pines.” The protest was famously documented by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). As Obomsawin’s film depicts, the Mohawk resistance inspired solidarity among Canadian First Nations and received support, in the form of organized protests and blockades, from Indigenous populations and allies across the continent.

Stewart’s Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World (2022) does not reference the Oka Crisis directly, but argues that the interest in – and passion for – political protest and action inspired by events in the 1990s, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, is reflected in the fiction of the decade. Stewart describes “angry planet fiction” as both a body of work and a reading practice that “recognizes planetary motion and material contingency as forms of nonhuman agency” (4). Focusing on works including Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990), and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Stewart acknowledges that, “[n]ot all authors of angry planet fiction speak for or from Indigenous experience, but they all embrace variations of a relationship to land that has strong precedents in Indigenous knowledge traditions and practices that, as the authors of a recent Land Back report assert, ‘embody critical knowledge that can relink society to a healthy balance within the natural world’” (5). In this way, angry planet fiction “closely overlaps” with the genre of speculative fiction, as both explore the impact of colonial terraforming (16). In addition, angry planet fiction is “interested, like feminist materialisms, in what happens when nature ‘punches back’ at humans and the machines they construct” (23). Key to Stewart’s argument, however, is that while the presence of an agentic and angry earth in American literature was often celebrated in the years after the end of the Cold War, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, rendered activist and revolutionary destruction taboo. [End Page 124]