78: Reactionary Fantasies: On “Cancel Culture” and Moral Panic feat. Adrian Daub

Abby and Patrick welcome academic, writer, and In Bed With the Right podcast co-host Adrian Daub to discuss his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How An American Obsession Went Global. Daub’s book is an exploration of the discourse over “cancel culture” that sets the concept in both historical and global context. In what ways is talk of “cancel culture” merely a return of decades-old complaints about so-called “political correctness,” and in what ways is it different? Why do broad narratives about getting canceled catch on, and what does it mean that anecdotes are so central to their virality? Why do fantasies about college campuses feature so prominently in cancel culture stories? From its origins as a quintessentially American phenomenon, how has the furor over cancel culture crossed borders and languages, crystalized into terms like the French “le wokeism”? What do our fantasies of cancelation activate, what do they confirm, and what are the deeper anxieties they variously betray or conceal? It’s a wide-ranging interrogation of reactionary politics, reaction formations, and histrionics in our chaotic digital moment.

The Cancel Culture Panic is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cancel-culture-panic-how-an-american-obsession-went-global-adrian-daub/21145470?ean=9781503640849

What Tech Calls Thinking is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/what-tech-calls-thinking-an-inquiry-into-the-intellectual-bedrock-of-silicon-valley-adrian-daub/14220491?ean=9780374538644

In Bed With the Right (with Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan) is here: https://www.patreon.com/c/InBedWiththeRight

Also discussed: Samuel P. Catlin, “The Campus Does not Exist: How Campus War is Made,” available at https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist

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