Excitable, not to say rabid, anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova made himself famous last week by telling Columbia University students that he wished "a million Mogadishus" on American troops in Iraq. When his desire that his fellow countrymen suffer death and mutilation at the hands of Islamic mobs became public knowledge the young academic clarified his remarks: what he really wanted, he said, was that they would suffer one huge Vietnam. Oddly, this did not seem to mollify his critics and now the bold spokesman for the triumph of Baathist torturers has had to go into hiding because of numerous death threats.
Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger had to perform a deft bit of legerdemain in simultaneously defending De Genova's right to free speech and distancing his university as far from the blowhard's remarks as was humanly possible. It is expected that fund-raising efforts will be seriously damaged by the controversy and the outrage it engendered among alumni. I say "amen" to that. It is Columbia's own fault that this sort of brouhaha has erupted and besmirched the university's reputation: it hired De Genova and lots more like him in the Anthropology Department. You must expect trouble and nonsense when you employ someone who sums up his research interests thusly:
"My ethnographic research explores the social productions of racialized and spatialized difference in the experiences of transnational Mexican migrant workers within the space of the U.S. nation-state. More specifically, I examine transnational urban conjunctural spaces that link the U.S. and Latin America as a standpoint of critique from which to interrogate U.S. nationalism, political economy, racialized citizenship, and immigration law."
Got that? Beneath the postmodern blather he is announcing that his academic work is meant to be turned to particular political purposes. His research on migrant labour and rap music and his speech at the infamous teach-in are all of a piece. Columbia has no right to express surprise at his radical opinions. A look at the faculty directory of the Anthropology Department will reveal many other professors of a similarly far-left persuasion spouting 1990s pomo drivel about "the politics of re-presentation", "reconstructed performances [serving] as regenerative mechanisms" or "negotiating gender and nation in performative space".
If De Genova survives the angry alumni who want to parade his head on a pole, his career is unlikely to suffer from the recent public relations blunder. The like-minded anthropologists who will decide on his tenure will certainly keep him around to blight the academic landscape for decades to come.
Posted by at April 3, 2003 12:22 PM