The Cancel Culture Panic

A spectre is haunting Europe, indeed the whole world – the spectre of Cancel Culture. According to various newspapers, particularly white men over forty are now practically forbidden from saying anything at all if they don’t want to risk their reputation or even their jobs. Is there any truth in this? Or is this more likely scaremongering that stylizes activists as a threat to the moral order so as to discredit their legitimate concerns?

Cancel culture is generally thought to have originated at US universities. Adrian Daub teaches literary studies at Stanford University, California. He shows how patterns of interpretation developed during the Reagan years were disseminated via campus novels and transferred to society at large. Journalists, essayists and conservative activist learned to pick out a few anecdotes and share them, creating a semi-fictional campus space they could populate with increasingly outlandish claims. But while those claims were largely aimed at a US audience, they found eager secondary consumers abroad. It turned out that UK, German and French audiences could be made to care about stories from Evergreen State College. But in each country these stories took on a significantly different function in a significantly different context. Using quantitative analyses, Daub traces how »cancel culture«-stories spread until they reached the Twitter accounts of German politicians, the UK’s House of Lords, and the talking point of Russia’s president.

»Adrian Daub shows how Cancel Culture has developed and why its connection to universities is so important.« Carolin Wiedemann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Daub’s book is a sparkling firework of brilliant ideas as well as a stylistic sensation.« Tom Wohlfarth, neues deutschland

»A plea for careful deliberation and reflection.« Florian Baranyi, ORF

»Cancel Culture Transfer [is] an asset – a powerful book accompanying the ongoing debate.« Beate Meierfrankenfeld, BR

»Cancel Culture Transfer by Adrian Daub provides the urgently needed demystification of a craze – a panic that isn’t started by mobs on Twitter but rather one that mainstream society tells itself. An important, intelligent and finally thoroughly analytical book on the overexcited debate.« Eva Marburg, SWR2

»There are so many scintillating aperçus in Daub’s book that I gave up underlining.« Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times on What Tech Calls Thinking