Authors Nicolette D'Angelo
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On what “burn it all down” really means, where it comes from, and why the predominant reactions to Sarah Bond’s original tweet from academics are willfully ignorant and reactionary. Thread.
Talk of “burning it all down” is not new nor aimed at nihilism. It's a standard phrase in abolitionist scholarship, aimed at dismantling structures that at best treat decolonization as an intellectual debate, and at worst enact state-sanctioned death.
In academia, I, like Sarah Bond, take “burning it all down” thus to mean addressing that white supremacy, casualization, and sexual violence are not aberrations, but business as usual in academia, such that a radical restructuring is required.
.@Eidolon (rip) published an editorial on “burning it all down” in 2019. “Bound to infuriate Boomers,” this kind of rhetoric is “a challenge to imagine how, if you had a blank slate, you’d go about solving big problems in creative, radical ways.”
At AIASCS 2018, @platanoclassics urged against defending the field, calling instead “for this contemporary configuration of Classics to die, so that it might be born into a new life.” Merely waiting out the storm is "not only unethical but
Talk of “burning it all down” is not new nor aimed at nihilism. It's a standard phrase in abolitionist scholarship, aimed at dismantling structures that at best treat decolonization as an intellectual debate, and at worst enact state-sanctioned death.
In academia, I, like Sarah Bond, take “burning it all down” thus to mean addressing that white supremacy, casualization, and sexual violence are not aberrations, but business as usual in academia, such that a radical restructuring is required.
You can care about certain scholars, students, material culture, and texts within a field and still want that field to be dismantled and burned so that those elements can be truly saved & white supremacy can be smothered.
— Dr. Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond) January 23, 2021
.@Eidolon (rip) published an editorial on “burning it all down” in 2019. “Bound to infuriate Boomers,” this kind of rhetoric is “a challenge to imagine how, if you had a blank slate, you’d go about solving big problems in creative, radical ways.”
At AIASCS 2018, @platanoclassics urged against defending the field, calling instead “for this contemporary configuration of Classics to die, so that it might be born into a new life.” Merely waiting out the storm is "not only unethical but