Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus by Rebecca Gould (review)

The works of indigenous writers of the Caucasus have been neglected in studies of literary representations of the region. Rather, scholars have focused on the works of Russian writers and the place of the Caucasus in the Russian literary imagination.¹ Rebecca Gould's Writers and Rebels explores the aestheticization of violence across multiple Caucasus literatures of insurgency, and places these literatures in conversation with each other. Drawing on fluency in Arabic, Chechen, Georgian, and Russian, Gould has written the first major comparative study of the literatures of the Caucasus. Similarly impressive, and rare for a Western scholar, Gould draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the North Caucasus. Gould's work also impresses in its ability to breakdown the disciplinary and geographic barriers that have constrained Caucasus studies. While an emphasis on anti-colonial resistance has dominated Caucasus studies, the ways in which literature and its aesthetics of violence shaped the interpretive frameworks of people in the region have largely been ignored (and this applies to Eurasian studies more broadly). To the extent that scholarship on the Caucasus engages with literature, it is usually viewed as a reflection of politics. Gould's interdisciplinary approach to the region, which draws on insights from subaltern studies, aesthetic theory, literary theory, post-structuralism, and Western Marxism, reveals the ways in which texts "giv[e] birth to new ways of conceiving political life" (P. 23). Caucasus studies has also been characterized by a tendency to see the North and South Caucasus in isolation from each other. In focusing on works of Georgian literature that have taken anti-colonial resistance in North Caucasus as their subject and highlighting how Georgian writers contributed to the aestheticization of violence in their writings in ways that parallel the work of Chechen writers, Gould helps break down this artificial scholarly divide.

More than covering an understudied literary history, Gould contributes to the study of anti-colonial violence by adopting the methods of literary anthropology, which uses literature to understand culture and social life. While most studies of anti-colonial violence have asked why anti-state actors turn to violence, Gould explores "the literary and aesthetic question of why and how anticolonial violence mesmerizes and mobilizes religious sensibilities" (P. 7). Gould argues that it is through these questions that we can better understand "how violence can become a viable – and often the only – modality of social existence, and of resistance, in societies ravaged by colonial and neocolonial rule" (P. 7). For Gould, it is through "the repetition and performance of [anti-colonial] violence in cultural production" that violence becomes aestheticized and, ultimately, attractive (P. 6). This understanding of how literary representations of violence become part of cultural memory offers a new way of answering the question so often asked by political scientists of the Caucasus and Eastern Europe: Why do some conflicts persist while others dissipate?

Transgressive sanctity is the conceptual framework that undergirds Gould's examination of the aestheticization of violence in Caucasus literatures of insurgency. Transgressive sanctity is the sacralization of rebellion through "transgression against an externally imposed legal order" that has not yet become hegemonic and is seen as illegitimately imposed. According to Gould, "the transgressive act [results] in the altering of local legal, aesthetic, and ethical norms" (P. 3). Transgressive sanctity emerged as a means of challenging colonial governmentality in the wake of the defeat of Imam Shamil and his theocratic anti-colonial state after more than twenty-five years of resistance to Russian rule. At this point, hope was lost for successful anti-colonial resistance and there was a vacuum of authority caused by the destruction of the indigenous legal system and the rejection of the externally imposed colonial order. In this context, the abrek – the precolonial socialbandit-turned-sacred-warrior – defended indigenous communal values from colonialism by "craft[ing] an alternative ethical system" (P. 7). The abrek did this "by violating an external...