Silence in the Mexican south

The Zapatistas have now retreated into silence

By Nick Caistor in Chiapas

A tiny old man wearing a green oilskin hat and a red poncho
comes shuffling up to me in the street. He's got a huge
plastic bag hanging down his back, held on by a strap across
his forehead, and he wants to sell me whatever is in it.

He is one of the majority of indigenous people who live in
this region in Mexico's deep south.

hydrarchist writes This interview was published in the second issue of Make World Magazine.

Empire’s commercial success indicates how the interpretative proposal
of the book resonates with the reality of the present. The proposal
has become, thorugh agreement or disagreement, a compulsory
point of reference in the debate on the global world. S11
intercepts it, is interrogated by it and interrogates it: especially the
relationship between the form of Imperial sovereignty outlined in
the book and the actual American policy. The latter seems to be
characterised as a traditional imperialist state that aims to redesign
the geo-political borders of the planet by mobilising national
identities more than as global decentred and deterritoiralised Empire
that administers hybrid identities and flexible hierachies with
no recourse to ethnic, national traditions and values.

The clash in the
western mind

Antonio Negri

Empire came out in the US at
the beginning of 2000 and in Italy two years later.
In between the two towers collapsed. One
would have expected the Italian edition to have
an additional chapter on S11 like many other political
books that came out this year. You didn’t
add one, is it because the event was not epochal
or because it did not constitute a surprise for
your thesis?