Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher

Re the ‘hounding’ on Twitter of the 3 women of colour - was this all out in the open?

Three women of colour who discussed the issue were also hounded on Twitter in the press.

Three women of colour were hounded in the press? Really? That’s awful 😢

When Dara McAnulty (who was 17 at the time) said he found the description of autistic students unsettling he was hounded by her supporters into a Twitter break!

Hounded? Or just ratioed? Pile-ons are never pleasant either way and it’s understandable that he chose to disengage from the whole thing.

She hounded the reviewer on GoodReads and threatened to contact her employer.

Did she know who the reviewer was and who her employer was? How?

OK so it turns out where I read that was upthread... but it's on Goodreads as well.

The descriptions of academia upthread are ridiculous mischaracterisations BTW. Academics are hardly immune from the daily grind and rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi.

She wasn't cancelled!
Also the book is a safeguarding nightmare: racist, classist, fatphobic and anti-Semitic. And the attitude towards autistic students is despicable.
However, the issue started when she flagged up a GoodReads review saying it should be taken down as it had fake quotes. She would never say anything racist like that. The quotes were not made up. She hounded the reviewer on GoodReads and threatened to contact her employer.
When Dara McAnulty (who was 17 at the time) said he found the description of autistic students unsettling he was hounded by her supporters into a Twitter break!
Three women of colour who discussed the issue were also hounded on Twitter in the press. People not of colour were ignored. It was very stark.

I saw somewhere she contacted the Goodreads woman's employer to complain. Not sure if it's true.

Sorry if it’s been mentioned earlier and I’ve missed it but did she genuinely dox the good reads reviewer?

There are lots of tweets saying the articles in support of her are all failing to mention her heinous threatening and doxing of this reviewer.

I know she drew attention to the review and attempted to get it removed but did she actually obtain the reviewers personal info and harass them? It’s hard to see how that would have been possible without hacking into the good reads site

The reason I ask is that her supposed harassment of this anonymous woman keeps getting cited as a reason nobody should have any sympathy for her. And it’s unclear whether she simply threw a tantrum and called the reviewer a liar without knowing her identity or actually did engage in harassment of someone whose name etc she knew.

It's the endpoint of that kind of activist-academic, where the whole point of study is about furthering an ideological position.

I don't think it's quite fair to condemn academia. Trust me, academia is just as split as Twitter when it comes to these debates.

I'm an academic who has a great deal of respect for Kate Clanchy and who thinks the way she's been treated is abominable.

There is something incredibly meanspirited about academic today. There's no joy in the modern cultivation of knowledge, in the exploration and expansion of a discipline. Instead, there's a mere determination to show that everyone and everything, other than one's close associates and their work, is "problematic"; indeed, one might come to the belief that this is the pre-determined end point of their work, even before they start.

I have a fair few reservations about Kate Clanchy and her work, but it's clear that she has a desire to help others, and a sincerity in her approach. And I sometimes think that sincerity is almost the most objectionable trait in the modern world of academia...

That is an interesting article. I used the term proof-texting earlier in the thread to describe how it seemed people were using quotes without looking at the larger shape of the text and the role they played within it, so it was really interesting to me to see that she talked about the same idea, and that it has become the think in criticism. I think that's true, now that I think about it. Which makes sense since it's part of a type of fundamentalist secular religious ideology.

I agree the comments were a little much, though I also think it's worth considering where the Unherd readers are coming from, which is a suspicion of the widespread assumption by progressives that western culture is inherently evil and needs to be deconstructed for some kind of multicultural decolonized vision (which doesn't include any of the embarrassing viewpoints of the natives, of course.)

In 2016, a young boy just arrived from Syria, Mohamed Assaf, tumbled into an Arabic poetry workshop I was running with Oxford University and wrote a short poem, apparently off the cuff. It took weeks to get it translated, then printed in a book I was making. It ran:

“The Word Ummi,
My beloved mother,
When I go to my house the pain of missing her
Arrives before me.”

That poem is amazingly evocative of how you can't outrun grief.

[quote Abitofalark]Article in UnHerd today by Kate Clancy

"You can’t cancel poetry
My students' piercing work will never be erased"

about the book of poetry of her immigrant pupils and the state of literary criticism today.

Eye-popping stuff.

unherd.com/2022/01/you-cant-cancel-poetry/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=a71c60fea8&mc_eid=31e133b3a4[/quote]
An excellent and moving article, I thought. Some of the comments underneath though! 😡

Clanchy

Article in UnHerd today by Kate Clancy

"You can’t cancel poetry
My students' piercing work will never be erased"

about the book of poetry of her immigrant pupils and the state of literary criticism today.

Eye-popping stuff.

unherd.com/2022/01/you-cant-cancel-poetry/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=a71c60fea8&mc_eid=31e133b3a4

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and this whole shitshow illustrates it.

Yes. This.

There's a meme seen around a bit which I'm quite fond of - it seems applicable to so much of this stuff. Not labelled right for this topic, but I think you'll get the point.

[quote whiteworldgettingwhiter]Check this out on why it's not good to describe people as if they were food - writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/95955707903/skin-writing-with-color-has-received-several[/quote]
Just on this.

That's a perfectly understandable opinion from someone who has decided to try and educate themselves on historical and cultural use of slurs. But it is just that, an opinion. You could know all that and yet also know that often when someone describes someone's skin colour by reference to food that they are just evoking an image not being racist. You might decide that it is not necessary to stop other people using normal modes of description to communicate. You might worry that expecting all other people either to know the matters talked about in this Tumblr (or to share the same cultural history and reference points) and agree it is "not good", or to censor all their speech in case they say something that is "not good" is unreasonable and divisive.

We have to let people be not racist without fear.