Reviews

Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus by Rebecca Ruth Gould

innashtakser's review against another edition

5.0

This is an excellent book on how the meeting between the modern coloniality and the traditional conceptions of right and wrong created a new concept of 'transgressive sanctity'. What this means is that in societies on which colonial law was imposed from outside, a literature promoting an idea of a violent challenger of the new law, acting in protection of his or, more rarely, her community, developed. The transgressive sanctity characterizes people who under normal circumstances would be considered criminals - violent individualists imposing their views on the community. In communities dealing with much more powerful colonial violence and incapable of winning the war against the colonial power though, such a figure was perceived as a protector due to the challenging of the colonial state's monopoly over violence.
The author depicts the development of transgressive sanctity as a notion in literature and culture of several Caucasian peoples and its popular acceptance. In a sense the book is about how in various societies popular perceptions and literature affected each other in constructing legitimacy for an anti-colonial state violence.