Marissa > Recent Status Updates

"Interpreters of literature are trained to analyze the imagination at play; in most early European accounts of the New World we are dealing instead with the imagination at work."

"Anecdotes then are among the principal products of a culture's representational technology, mediators between the undifferentiated succession of local moments and a larger strategy toward which they can only gesture."

"They were relying on the tested assumption that working strictly by the book is necessarily less productive than working with initiative,"

"the particular impurity this book will be pursuing through various theoretical languages is the trace of the medieval: the deep, sustaining, and constitutive role of the European Middle Ages...in the...theorization of language, culture, and society,"

"And as for those groups with populations of one, they confronted officials with the absurd prospect of minority delegates literally standing in on behalf of themselves— ones of a kind, the loneliest “nations” on earth"

"The more the realm of the "traditional" appeared to be discrete and closed, the greater the contrast with the "modern" appeared. The result was a stark traditional-modern dichotomy that presented the possible trajectories for local groups as dichotomous: either they would accept, succumb, or assimilate to the overwhelming pressures of state-driven modernization, or they would resist the same, to some uncertain fate.

"...the crucible of the Troubles forged a modern Russian Identity, one rooted in a particular nationalist view of Orthodox Christianity." (p.4)

"The Jadids were part of a cosmopolitan community of Muslims knit together by readership of common texts and by travel. They lived in the last generation when Muslim intellectuals in different countries could communicate with each other without the use of European languages," (p.113.)