It's been a while since I began and ended a relationship with a book in one day. But Fear of Small Numbers (only 150pgs) screamingly taunted me from the shelf with its conceptual complexity... and I figured, if I didn't consume it whole, I'd get lost in the brain-draining days between chapters. Think I was right. I feel in touch with the contexts and conclusions of Dr. Appadurai... These random phrases from this "Essay on the Geography of Anger" struck me as posti-it worthy:
Modern nation states... like the last dinosaurs, see that they are in a desperate struggle for survival as a global formation (21).
Terror... blurring the bounds between the spaces and times of war and peace.... violence as the central regulative principle of everyday life (32).
... worldwide genocidal impulse toward minorities... (40)
... United States, as an occupying power in Iraq, faces the fear that the small numbers who are continuing to torment and kill its soldiers are true representatives of the Iraqi people, who were originally scripted to greet the Americans as liberators and unfold the spectacle of a civil society underneath the carcass of the dictator (81).
... fearful symmetry between the fear of small numbers and the power of small numbers (113).
... spatialized fantasies that led George Bush and his advisors to try to localize Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and decimate a cell by erasing a landmass (116).
These cellular organizations.... a full scale alternative global polity.... (130)
From the drafts folder
6 years ago
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