Posted on 03/28/2003 5:44:19 AM PST by Sparky760
Defeat Troops, Professor Says Wants 'a million Mogadishus' By Ron Howell STAFF WRITER March 28, 2003 At an anti-war "teach-in" this week, a Columbia University professor called for the defeat of American forces in Iraq and said he would like to see "a million Mogadishus" - a reference to the Somali city where American soldiers were ambushed, with 18 killed, in 1993. "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military," Nicholas De Genova, an assistant professor of anthropology and Latino studies at Columbia University, told the audience at Low Library Wednesday night. "I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." De Genova was referring to the Mogadishu ambush and firefight, known for its graphic image of a slain American soldier being dragged through the streets. The battle was portrayed in the film "Black Hawk Down." The crowd was largely silent at De Genova's remark. They loudly applauded him later when he said, "If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine." At least two of the speakers who followed De Genova distanced themselves from his comments. One of them was teach-in organizer Eric Foner, a history professor, who disagreed with De Genova's assertion that Americans who called themselves "patriots" also were white supremacists. In a telephone interview yesterday, Foner went further in his criticism, calling De Genova's statements "idiotic." "I thought that was completely uncalled for," Foner said. "We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers." Foner said that because of the university's tradition of freedom of speech, it was unlikely De Genova would suffer professionally in any way because of what he said. "A person's politics have no impact on their employment status here, whether they are promoted, whether they are fired or whether they get tenure," Foner said. De Genova did not want to discuss yesterday whether he had tenure. Acknowledging his beliefs are more radical than those of many others at Wednesday's forum, he said his remarks reflect his concern for oppressed people. While he did not retract his statements, he said he hoped they do not lead to "death threats," like those he received after a controversial speech at a pro-Palestinian rally last spring. Regarding Wednesday's reference to Mogadishu, the professor, who is 35 and from Chicago, said the U.S. Army is composed largely of men and women who have a "treacherous lack of prospects for a decent life," but even so, they "have a choice" in whether to oppress people like the Iraqis. He said the Iraqis must liberate themselves from domestic oppressors as well as from foreign invaders like the United States. More than 3,000 students and faculty attended the Wednesday teach-in, which lasted from 6 p.m. until about midnight and featured more than two dozen professors and other scholars. The applause at De Genova's call for the defeat of U.S.-led forces in Iraq reflected widespread frustration at the inability to reverse President George W. Bush's Middle East policies, Foner said. "A kind of flamboyant statement like that will get an applause in the heat of the moment," the history professor said. By turns, the speakers Wednesday night said the Bush administration's actions in Iraq were bullying, illegal, deceitful, corrupt and murderous. History professor Barbara J. Fields said like-minded Americans should vigorously oppose Bush. "The 'good Germans' of the Nazi era were the few who said, 'No,'" Fields declared. Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
No they aren't. De Genova is just more explicit and upfront about what he really thinks. In this limited respect (and only in this respect) I applaud the callous, bilious, freedom-hating freak.
ALSO...
President of Columbia
Name: LEE C BOLLINGER
Mail Addr: 202 LOW LIBRARY
mail code 4309
Phone: MS 4-9970
+1 212-854-9970
UNI: lcb50
E-mail: bollinger@columbia.edu
Also, the perp's dept. chair...
NICHOLAS B. DIRKS, Professor and Chair
Telephone: (212) 854-7785
Office: 960 Schermerhorn Ext.
E-mail: nbd7@columbia.edu
NICHOLAS DE GENOVA, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Telephone: (212) 854-0199
office: 416 Hamilton
email: npd18@columbia.edu <mailto: npd18@columbia.edu>
The central concerns of my research and teaching include: labor and class formation, racialization, the production of urban space, nationalism, the politics of citizenship, and transnational social processes, especially migration. 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. This work contributes to a reconceptualization of Latin American, Latino, and "American" (U.S.) Studies. Likewise, I am interested in the methodological problems of ethnographic research practice and the limits of anthropological disciplinary forms of knowledge and modes of representation.
Representative Publications:
1995 "Gangster Rap and Nihilism in Black America: Some Questions of Life and Death." Social Text 43: 89-132. 1995 "Check Your Head: The Cultural Politics of Rap Music." Transition 67: 123-37. 1996 "Split-Level Bedlam: Chicago at the End of the Twentieth Century." Public Culture 9:1: 114-25. 1997 "The Junkyard of Futures Past." Anthropology and Humanism 22:2: 171-79. 1998 "Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago." Latin American Perspectives 102: 25:5: 87-116.
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