« Strange bedfellows | Main | Snow days »
March 23, 2005
Ward Churchill, pt. II
More data, with little time to think about it just now. Logging in this new source for future contemplation:
Chuck Bazerman, "[RFP] Fwd: [teach] Fw: Update on Ward Churchill." Rhetoricians for Peace 23 Mar. 2005.
Accusations of plagiarism are very often political. To establish a person as a plagiarist is, in the common calculus, to establish him as a person of low morals. The timing of the accusations against Churchill does not seem innocent. Questions: Did he actually plagiarize, or are these accusations themselves fabrications? In the case of Dr. King, the plagiarism was real, and his biographer David Levering Lewis made some scurrilous accusations based on them—accusations that linked King's plagiarism with sexual promiscuity: textual promiscuity was equated with sexual promiscuity. Though there was indeed evidence for both, it was the equation that I found disturbing. King's editors, when they discovered the plagiarism, tried to suppress it until it could be released in a non-politicized manner. They were accused of sanitizing King's record.
So my question is not one of whether Churchill did or did not plagiarize (though I would indeed like to know the answer to that question). Rather, I would like to know more about the people making the accusation, the timing of their accusations, and the ways in which their claims are being championed and countered.
Posted by senioritis at March 23, 2005 07:57 PM
Comments
Exactly! Just as Susan Miller wrote, in 1991, that it's a particular mixture of timing, entitlements, and luck that render some writers rather than others "important," so too is it a mixture of timing, entitlements, and luck (or lack thereof) that render some rather than others plagiarists. Bourdieu's work helps me understand that not just anybody can label a writer a plagiarist, just as not just anybody can label a writer an author. Who's got the requisite cultural capital to do so? Why Churchill? Why now? Whose interests does it serve?
Posted by: aerobil at March 24, 2005 08:51 AM