Professor Bruce Gilley teaches political science at Portland State University. His publisher has backed away from him after pressure from a self-described Maoist.
Gilley has been through similar experiences before now, and we have covered it.
He writes at the Wall Street Journal:
The Cancel Mob Comes Back for MoreFor the second time in my academic career, I have been canceled. Last week Lexington Books, the academic imprint of the publisher Rowman & Littlefield, decided not to publish my forthcoming biography of a late colonial official, “The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire.” It came a mere two weeks before the book was due to ship. At the same time, Lexington Books canceled the new book series, “Problems of Anti-Colonialism,” of which my book was to be the first installment.The cancellations began Sept. 26 with a petition that snowballed on social media. It was started by Joshua Moufawad-Paul, an avowed Maoist philosopher in Toronto whose blog is titled “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Mayhem!” and books include “The Communist Necessity.” By Sept. 28 all mention of my book had been air-brushed from the publisher’s site without a word to me. For two days, I sought explanation and received only silence. I requested they return to me the rights to the book, which they quickly did. Lexington then canceled the book series without explanation.This erasure is very similar to my first, in 2017, when the publisher Taylor & Francis withdrew my peer-reviewed article “The Case for Colonialism” from the journal Third World Quarterly. The journal’s editor had received “serious and credible threats of personal violence” following a global petition campaign led by Farhana Sultana of Syracuse University (who also tried to get Princeton to revoke my doctorate). I consented to the withdrawal in the interest of the safety of the editorial staff.“The Last Imperialist” is the culmination of five years of intensive primary source research into the life of Burns, who was governor of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and a prominent critic of rapid decolonization while serving at the United Nations after World War II. The book passed peer review with Lexington Books last December, and it carried endorsements from two giants in the field of colonial history, Jeremy Black and Tirthankar Roy. The book was already being sold to distributors and stores.
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