Working in a turbulent area of the world, Rebecca Gould is a courageous scholar, and Writers and Rebels opens a radically new window on the history and culture of the region. Gould’s mastery of Chechen, Arabic, Russian, and Georgian enables her to explore depths and nuances of Islamic resistance and anticolonial sentiment that scholarly dependence on Russian-language work has previously left obscure.
Gould describes herself as a scholar at the intersection of literature and anthropology; as she suggests, she studies the anthropology of literature. In her account, literature can help not only explicate or reflect social phenomena—in this case, the seemingly intractable violence in the Caucasus—but create and influence actors and actions in real history. Her interdisciplinary approach is essential to a more nuanced understanding of the cultures—Chechen and Daghestani, in particular—that tend to get tossed into a single Caucasus basket. Focusing on “the aestheticization of violence” and “transgressive sanctity”...
