Cosmovisions

This article examines the issue of environmental justice and cosmovision in transnational American studies and indigenous literature. It contends that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera had significant influence on the politicized multiculturalism in foundational American Studies texts and early ecocriticism. It also argues that these works served as the bases for the concepts of “traffic in toxins” and “slow violence” and that they also contributed in redefining the questions that shape Native American studies and its relation to American Studies.