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I had also written that academia hoards its resources through expensive, paywalled journal articles, at which she sneered that I clearly did not know how to access academic journals from a public library, using New York’s system as an example of free access. This was an incorrect summation and not a very subtle bit of race-baiting it was also a rather ridiculous approach, given the irrefutable point that academe is dominated by white men – which is what I had actually stated. Responses to the essay included several distortions that even ignored its arguments.įor instance: Kang, who teaches at John Jay in New York, claimed that one of my main points was that only a few white professors engage in political discourse. I began getting concerned messages from friends and strangers, all puzzled by the level of vitriol. At some point, I lost track of how many more had posted the piece simply to vent about how much they hated it. Following his example, several others including Nikhil Singh, Susan Kang, Jodi Dean, Laleh Khalili, and Bruce Robbins, went on the attack, either on their own walls or those of numerous others. He called me a misanthrope who had a personal vendetta against Ciccariello-Maher, and proclaimed I was unfair to academe. The first to draw blood was Doug Henwood, who occupies a somewhat king-like space in Leftbook. The waters of “ Leftbook,” a loose conglomeration of people and personalities identified or self-identifying as leftists (I count myself among them) churned for hours and days as commenters took to the view that my critique of academia was merely a front for attacking Ciccariello-Maher. Over the course of several days, I watched what looked like a scene from Jaws, except that the Big Angry Shark was now joined by all his very hungry friends and family. That brief segment incited much ire, unbridled and ferocious, from several commenters. I pointed out that his tweet had been cryptic, that no marginalised populations had asked to be saved, that much of his politics was posturing as radical, and that the controversy was mostly self-curated. The resulting internet uproar had resulted in a backlash against him, prompting several leftists to claim that he was acting on behalf of marginalised populations and that his free speech rights as a political radical were being violated.

In December of 2016, the then-professor at Drexel University had sent out what he claimed was an “ironic” tweet about wanting “white genocide” for Christmas. Three hundred of the words, ten percent, were about George Ciccariello-Maher. Three thousand words in length, the essay’s central point was that there is not much left (pun intended) that is truly radical about academia and academics. What follows is a set of analyses and theories about belonging on social media, about how worlds and communities are imagined and re-imagined on the internet, about ghostly economies of power and influence, about the migration of social patterns of exclusion and inclusion onto the internet, about the invention of a genre of writing that can describe and analyse women’s theories about what happens to them without their having to first weep and moan in modes of confession and fits of memoir.Ī brief history: I had just published “ The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species” in Current Affairs. The screeds came not from rabid, easily despised Gamers or right-wing fanatics for whom my multiple identities as a brown queer leftist woman and animal lover had finally proven too much, but from leftists. In Spring 2017, I watched people attack me online and even wish for my death in direct and indirect ways.
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What follows inaugurates a series of essays on social media as a set of apparatuses that manifest hidden systems of power. This is a ghost story and a murder mystery, impelled by the remains of happenings that resembled events. This is a piece about Shame on the internet. And Guadalajara’s just a few miles down the line.
