Nicolás Medina Mora at The Nation:
So if Now I Surrender is neither a western nor an anti-western, then what is it? My answer is that it’s a counter-western: a narrative that answers the fictional history of North America not by inverting the polarity of its values, but by adopting an entirely different set of rules. It’s on this point that Enrigue’s status as a political philosopher becomes undeniable: Among many other things, his novel is an argument for a nondialectical approach to fundamental questions that understands that to reduce difference to negation is just another way to erase it. Geronimo was not merely non-Western: He was who he was. The tragedy for everyone involved, including Mexican and American colonizers, is that the insistence that he had to become either Mexican or American or else nothing at all robbed us all of what may well have been our last chance to pull the emergency brake on the locomotive of Western politics and halt its mad race toward disaster. The logical end point of the nation-state, after all, is often the concentration camp: the enclosure of exclusion to which societies so lacking in political imagination as to become convinced that they have no choice but to impose a way of life amenable to the unequal accumulation of capital banish their indocile subjects for no crime other than being different.
more here.
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