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Cancel Culture
A Critical Analysis

Eve Ng
Cancel Culture
 Eve Ng

Cancel Culture
A Critical Analysis
Eve Ng
School of Media Arts and Studies
Ohio University
Athens, OH, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-97373-5    ISBN 978-3-030-97374-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97374-2

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 Acknowledgments

Like most books, probably, the completion of this one was borne of con-
verging circumstances. In 2019, Jonathan Ong invited me to contribute
to the 20th anniversary issue of Television & New Media, and that 2020
essay became the first academic article on “cancel culture,” in a year when
discussions about the phenomenon surged in U.S. cultural and political
discourse. With my long-time research interests in popular media and dig-
ital cultures, it seemed timely to delve more deeply into the topic. Second,
I happened to be on sabbatical, and am grateful that both my academic
units at Ohio University—the School of Media Arts and Studies and the
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program—allowed me to devote
the 2020–21 academic year to a range of research projects, including, as it
turned out, this one.
When this book was still at the proposal stage, my Palgrave editor,
Camille Davies, was responsive and enthusiastic, fielding my questions and
shepherding me through the bulk of the process, until passing the baton
to Karthika Devi Ravikumar and her competent production team. I also
thank the two anonymous reviewers for Palgrave who expressed confi-
dence in the significance of this project and offered valuable feedback. My
wonderful Ohio University Media Arts and Studies colleague, Laeeq
Khan, graciously shared his indispensable knowledge about research meth-
ods for big data and social media platforms, which helped me frame my
own approaches. And I much appreciate Lynn Comella, Jonathan Gray,
and Emily West providing nuggets of wisdom about completing and pub-
lishing a book.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The combination of sabbatical and a global pandemic kept me more

confined to my sabbatical base than I had expected during much of the
writing of this book. But how lovely to have had all that time podding
with the Baird-Sears clan (Stephanie, Ben, and Lyra), including every
meaningful holiday—and to have Stephanie cheering me on as she com-
pleted her own book! There was also the delightful company of Shakuntala
(Fugu) Ray and Steph Kent, not least those precious masked minutes in
parking lots pre-vaccine. And, like for many of us, crucial sustenance has
come through little Zoom boxes, during all the Friday calls with my
forever-­grad school-comrades-in-arms, Sreela Sarkar, Sunny Lie, Fugu,
and Steph, as well as WhatsApp video-chats with my parents, Siang Ng
and Yew Kwang Ng, and sister Aline Shaw across the miles and time zones.
Last but never least, to my daughter Quinn: when you first heard I was
writing a book, you excitedly offered to produce the artwork for its cover!
That wasn’t possible for Cancel Culture, but as I already told you, I can’t
wait to have your amazing talents grace my next book.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Bibliography  11

2 Cancel Culture, Popular Media, and Fandom 13

Introduction  14
Digital Engagement, Social Media “Receipts,” and Collective
Fan Actions  16
Celebrity Cancellings: The 2019 James Charles-Tati Westbrook
Feud  20
Fandom Activist Cancellings: The 100 and #CancelColbert  23
Conclusion  29
Bibliography  33

3 Cancel Culture, Black Cultural Practice, and Digital Activism  39

Introduction  40
Digital Activism: From Web 1.0 to Hashtag Activism  41
Black Twitter: Cultural and Political Formations  44
The Lineage to “Cancel Culture” from Black Culture and Media  47
Sexual Misconduct Cancellings: #MeToo, Louis C.K., and James
Franco  54
Racism, Regular People Behaving Badly, and Debates About
Cancelling  61
Conclusion  64
Bibliography  68

vii
viii Contents

4 Cancel Culture, U.S. Conservatism, and Nation 73

Introduction  74
American Conservativism, Nationalism, and Whiteness  75
George Floyd Protests and a National Reckoning on Racial
Injustice  79
Media Content, “Free Speech,” and American Identity  81
Donald Trump’s Second Impeachment  85
Conclusion  89
Bibliography  95

5 Cancel Culture and Digital Nationalism in Mainland China101

Introduction 102
Nationalist Protest in Mainland China: A Background 103
The 2018 Cancelling of Dolce & Gabbana 109
The 2021 Xinjiang Cotton Cancellings of Western Brands 114
The 2020 Cancelling of 2gether, PRC-Thailand Meme Wars,
and the Milk Tea Alliance 118
Conclusion 122
Bibliography 130

6 Conclusion137
Bibliography 145

Index149
 About the Author

Eve Ng is an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies

and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Ohio
University. Her research examines queer media, digital cultures,
LGBTQ activism, and race, nation, and postcoloniality, and has
appeared in Communication, Culture & Critique, Development and
Change, Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Studies, International Journal
of Communication, Journal of Film and Video, Popular Communication,
Television & New Media, and Transformative Works and Culture, as well
as Gender, Race and Class in Media (Eds. Gail Dines and Jean Humez,
SAGE 2011, 2014) and the Routledge Companion to Media and Human
Rights (Eds. Howard Tumber and Sylvio Waisbord, 2017). She is an
associate editor of Communication, Culture & Critique, on the edito-
rial board of Transformative Works and Culture, and has been inter-
viewed as an expert by BBC News, Huffington Post, Washington Post,
and other major news and entertainment outlets.

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter introduces and defines “cancel culture” as com-

prising both cancel practices (cancelling) that involve actions against a can-
cel target, which may be an individual, brand, or company, and cancel
discourses, which is commentary about cancelling. It lays out the scope of
the book, which analyzes several domains of “cancel culture” from a criti-
cal media and cultural studies perspective. Data examined include posts on
social media platforms, comment threads on news and opinion articles,
and commentary pieces about “cancel culture.” Outlines are provided for
the upcoming chapters, which address “cancel culture” in relation to
celebrity and fan cultures, Black communicative practices and digital activ-
ism, U.S. conservative critiques of “cancel culture,” and digital nationalist
cancellings in mainland China.

Keywords Cancel discourses • Cancel practices • Cancel targets •

Critical media studies

On October 7, 2020, a short recorded speech by BTS, the immensely

popular South Korean K-pop band, was played during a virtual awards
ceremony; it was their acceptance for the Van Fleet Award from the U.S.-
based Korea Society, bestowed annually since 1995 “for outstanding con-
tributions to the promotion of U.S.-Korea relations.” Each of the seven
band members spoke, noting BTS’s global appeal and making anodyne

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
E. Ng, Cancel Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97374-2_1
2 E. NG

comments about people being similar everywhere and music being a way
to bring “connection” and “solidarity.” It was, however, the final remarks
of the member known as RM (Kim Nam-joon) that thrust the group into
a social media firestorm. Recognizing that 2020 was the 70th anniversary
of the start of the Korean War (1950–1953), RM went on to say, “We will
always remember the history of pain that our two nations shared together,
and the sacrifices of countless men and women,” referencing South Korea
and the U.S. as the “two nations.”1
Many mainland Chinese Internet users, or “netizens,” expressed their
anger at the fact that RM did not mention the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), which had also lost many soldiers when it had fought alongside
North Korea. “China sacrificed 360,000 soldiers,” one posted; “Get out.
BTS is dead,” said another. Furthermore, mainland Chinese fans of BTS
were also excoriated for supporting a group that had, according to the
critics, severely insulted their country.2 In addition, various mainland
Chinese media outlets, including official papers of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP), ran articles sympathetic to the BTS critics. For example, the
CCP’s English-language Global Times noted that “Many Chinese netizens
pointed out that the speech plays up to U.S. netizens, but the country
played the role of aggressor in the war.”3 There were quick consequences
for BTS’s online visibility with several major South Korean corporations,
including electronics giant Samsung removing a special-edition smart-
phone made for BTS from its mainland Chinese website, car manufacturer
Hyundai taking down commercials and other references to BTS from its
Chinese social media accounts, and sportswear company Fila, for which
BTS is a brand ambassador, deleting posts mentioning the band that had
previously been up on its official account on the Weibo social media
platform.4
Like many such recent incidents, after a few days, the outrage on social
media died down; PRC government officials also made more conciliatory
statements. In a regular press briefing on October 12, 2020, Zhao Lijian,
spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, responded to reporter
questions about the BTS speech by acknowledging that it had “triggered
controversy, with some Chinese saying online that it’s a matter of national
dignity and calling for a boycott of the products the band endorses,” but
declining to align the Foreign Ministry itself with this position, saying that
“we all should learn lessons from history and look forward to the future,
hold dear peace and strengthen friendship.”5 Still, for the much-hyped
HBO Max reunion special of the cast of the sitcom Friends (NBC,
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

1994–2004), which was released over seven months later, BTS’s short
cameo, in which they reminisced about watching the show when they
younger, was cut in the versions that aired on three different mainland
Chinese video platforms (most likely by the platforms themselves, as the
cuts were of slightly variant lengths), demonstrating that the consequences
were ongoing.6
While there are a plethora of examples to choose from, I begin with this
one, as it illustrates multiple threads that this book will address in present-
ing a critical analysis of what has become to be known as “cancel culture.”
One is the prominence of fan cultures in contemporary mediated environ-
ments. While fandom used to be more subcultural and stigmatized, many
of its practices are now much more visible through both the mainstream-
ing of fandom and the ascension of social media platforms, which fans
have widely adopted. Second, much of the discussion around “cancel cul-
ture” is bound up with social media activism, and the BTS speech incident
demonstrates one instance of rapid online mobilization around a specific
issue or cause. Fandoms have a long history of organizing mass efforts
around media texts, especially television shows, whose narratives and other
elements of production might be influenced by viewer preferences.
However, online activism is broader than this; the BTS incident was not
about media representation per se, and recent iterations of digital activism
such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have addressed issues such as
sexual misconduct and racial justice. Finally, the social media discourse and
mainland Chinese government responses to the controversy around RM’s
speech demonstrate how both cancelling and discourses about cancelling
have become explicitly entwined with nationalism and national-level poli-
tics. The example here occurred in mainland China, but as this book will
discuss, this has also happened in prominent ways in the U.S.
There is a significant amount of commentary on “cancel culture” in
news and popular media, yet such content in itself does not provide a clear
picture of the pertinent phenomena. For example, what are we to make of
the fact that a number of liberal as well as (a lot of) conservative commen-
tators in the U.S. and elsewhere have condemned “cancel culture”? Also,
cancelling has happened in many social and cultural domains; are these
fundamentally instances of the same thing? If not, what are the crucial dif-
ferences, and are there nevertheless underlying commonalities between
contextually disparate instances of cancelling? If we determine where and
when cancel practices originated, what would their evolution to the most
recent manifestations of cancelling tell us? Cancel Culture addresses these
4 E. NG

questions and other related issues to demonstrate the complexities and

relevance of “cancel culture” for understanding media and culture more
broadly.
A book on something that has become as pervasive as “cancel culture”
in popular discourse could be approached from many different angles.
Reflecting my research background and interests, this one is written from
a critical media and cultural studies perspective. Thus, it is attentive to the
dynamics of cultural and political power in media production, circulation,
and consumption: media use reflects and contributes to larger patterns of
social hierarchy, including gender, class, race, nation, and other axes of
inequality.7 In addition, it takes account of social and historical contexts,
even when examining contemporary media. That is, what might on the
surface look to be similar phenomena or instances of one phenomenon are
often not the same or even roughly equivalent. For example, race and cast-
ing controversies in recent years have highlighted the ways that hiring a
white actor to play a character who is a person of color in the source text
is not the same as choosing a person of color to play a character who is
white in the source text (or white in previous adaptations of that text).
Because mainstream U.S. media have disproportionately centered white
characters and employed white actors, the first kind of casting constitutes
a problematic “whitewashing” that exacerbates the inequalities of race and
media representation, while the second is a way to partly redress these
imbalances. In this vein of recognizing context, it is important to consider
who is involved in cancel practices and discourses—both those engaged in
cancelling and the cancel targets—and from what specific positions of rela-
tive empowerment or disempowerment.
Also, unlike several recently published books with “cancel culture” in
their titles, this book is not a deliberation on the effects of cancelling on
“free speech.”8 While I examine free speech discourses as part of my analy-
sis, the goal is not to adjudicate whether cancel practices as a whole are
helping or harming political deliberation, activism, or the political and
legal spheres more generally. Indeed, as I note in Chap. 4, the concept of
free speech itself is freighted with assumptions that reflect particular stand-
points about the dynamics of power in the media domain and elsewhere.
Rather, in taking a critical media studies approach, my focus is on how the
practices and discourses associated with “cancel culture” emerged and
developed, and the political implications of these developments are viewed
through a broader lens on power and society.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

It is useful at this point to define a number of terms that will recur

throughout. First, there is the cancel target, which can be an individual,
brand, or company that is subject to what I refer to as “cancelling” or
“cancel practices.” Some cancelling/cancel practices revolve around media,
including social media posts, both those that explicitly use the term “can-
celled” (e.g. #Elleniscancelled, #Youarecancelled), or posts that mean the
same thing, such as the “Get out. BTS is dead” post. Other cancel prac-
tices involve withdrawing public support from the cancel target, such as
unfollowing them on social media, no longer buying the brands in ques-
tion or those promoted by a targeted celebrity, no longer watching the
television/films or listening to the music they are associated with, and so
on. At the institutional level, cancel practices may involve literal cancelling,
such as networks cancelling television shows (or series or films in the
works) of stars who have behaved problematically. Corporations may com-
pletely terminate their public associations with cancelled targets, or take
less drastic measures, such as in response to the BTS Van Fleet award
speech incident; conversely, celebrities may terminate their sponsorship
agreements with companies deemed problematic. State-level actors may
also be involved in cancel practices, such as the PRC government’s ban on
Lady Gaga performing in mainland China after she met with the Dalai
Lama in 2016. Employers may terminate employees, whether for famous
celebrities, such as Roseanne Barr being fired from the revival of her ABC
sitcom Roseanne in 2018 for racist tweets, and ordinary people, such as a
white woman, Amy Cooper, losing her job after a May 2020 video of her
interactions with a Black male birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, in New York
City’s Central Park went viral.
Cancel discourses are discussions and commentary about cancel prac-
tices and their aftermath. Some cancel discourses, which can be thought of
as “first-order” (cancel) discourses, occur on the same platform as the one
where the original cancelling occurred; for example, a user retweeting a
cancel tweet and adding their own comment to it (whether they are sup-
porting or challenging the cancelling). Other (second-order) cancel dis-
courses emerge outside of the digital spaces where the cancelling
originated; news reports about the social media outrage to BTS’s Van
Fleet award speech, for instance, or blog posts about cancelling events.
Finally, then, cancel culture, which, as other scholars have pointed out,
is now commonly used in a pejorative sense within mainstream commen-
tary. Thus, in noting that cancelling and related practices such as “calling
out” are rooted in Black digital practices and, prior to that, Black oral
6 E. NG

traditions, media studies scholar Meredith Clark argued that these have
been problematically “counter-framed through application of the reduc-
tive and malignant label ‘cancel culture’.”9 For example, Alan Dershowitz,
the prominent liberal lawyer and political commentator, identified cancel
culture as the “illegitimate descendant” of both McCarthyism and
Stalinism, and blamed it for stifling political free speech and artistic cre-
ativity, as well as derailing the careers of prominent politicians, business
executives, and academics.10 And, from another point of the political spec-
trum, Kristian Jenkins defined cancel culture as “the process where activ-
ists drive opinion[,] forcing institutions to ‘cancel’ long dead luminaries
because of sins committed when they were alive that contravene contem-
porary woke ethics, such as failing to condemn racism back then with suf-
ficient zeal. Or when people are set upon by online mobs for breaking
woke codes, often leading to them losing their jobs,” claiming, among
various purported victims, former U.S. President Donald Trump for being
“impeached by the US Congress on false pretences because his political
opponents hate him and what he stands for.”11
In contrast, in this book, “cancel culture” encompasses both cancel
practices and cancel discourses, and is used as an analytic term rather than
one signaling a particular political standpoint. While this means that the
term necessarily encompasses a heterogeneous set of practices and texts, it
is a useful shorthand for referencing the relevant phenomena under con-
sideration. In the social sciences, culture at large is often defined as a sys-
tem of shared meanings and beliefs. For critical media and cultural studies,
much of the focus is on how such meanings and beliefs are produced,
consumed, and—importantly—contested on an uneven playing field.12
The fact that much mainstream commentary of “cancel culture” frames it
in negative terms, even though, as I will discuss, cancel practices emerged
from historically marginalized communities, is itself an example of this
contestation.
Much cancelling activity occurs on social media platforms, and as such,
there is an enormous amount of data; for even just a single case, there may
be thousands, tens of thousands, or more cancel tweets, not to mention
first-order and second-order discourses about the cancelling. A significant
body of media studies research makes use of “big data” approaches to
social media, which include methods for collecting, analyzing, and repre-
senting data, as well as considerations about research design and ethics
specific to investigating large amounts of data that have varying levels of
public-private access status. There are also qualitative methods, including
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

online interviews and digital ethnography, that have partial roots in offline
modes of research.13 Several scholars have advocated for mixed methods
or multimodal approaches to studying social media.14 Whether quantita-
tive, qualitative, or a combination of both, the goals of such research typi-
cally center on gaining understanding about various dimensions of social
media, including those to do with users (e.g. motivations, practices, and
effects), platform technologies, and broader economic, political, and legal
aspects, in order to better theorize technology and society, as well as spe-
cific areas such as interpersonal interactions, identity and community for-
mation, social activism and political engagement, and policy and regulation,
just to name a few.
My approach to primary data in this book is intentionally eclectic, in
order to cover multiple areas where the practices and discourses of cancel
culture have emerged and proliferated. Some of the comments or posts I
refer to have appeared in published articles and commentary essays; these
are often selected by the authors for having high numbers of likes or
reposts or for being one of the first instances of a particular cancel post
(these two often overlap). I also refer to the few empirical studies that have
begun to be published on cancel cases. In addition, I have gathered data
myself from news article comment threads, and posts on Twitter and
YouTube for U.S. cancel cases, and on the Chinese Weibo platform for the
mainland Chinese cases. However, I do not take a quantitative “big data”
approach, and my aim is not to be comprehensive, but reasonably repre-
sentative of the opinions expressed at key digital sites. Thus, although I
have not conducted full thematic analyses, for some case studies I identify
comments, replies, or reposts that have garnered the most likes/recom-
mendations from other users in order to analyze what perspectives they
expressed, as well as noting other themes present in the comment threads
overall. Second-order discourses are also important, i.e. commentaries
about cancel posts and practices that frame mainstream understandings of
“cancel culture.”
The selection of the cancel cases examined in most detail reflects my
greatest familiarity with U.S. culture and politics, and secondarily, main-
land China, but I recognize the necessarily limited scope that results, given
that “cancel culture” has manifested more broadly. Still, the cases should
serve as snapshots that are illustrative of the issues being considered. As for
the choice of topics and theoretical perspectives, I am aware that writing a
book on any subject is always a bit of a conceit; how could any single effort
contain “enough”? For example, I do not include events within young
8 E. NG

adult publishing or academia that some commentators have held up as

examples of “cancel culture.”15 In addition, there is also the inconvenient
fact that how “cancel culture” is understood and discussed is likely to keep
evolving. Still, I see the upcoming chapters as usefully situating the emer-
gence of cancelling within a larger landscape of digital and pre-digital
interaction, and tying together manifestations of cancel culture in three
distinct though inter-connected realms: popular media and fandom, activ-
ism, and national politics. In doing so, the book provides a framework for
other investigations of “cancel culture,” as well as illustrating how digital
practices and discourses are key for understanding the dynamics of media,
culture, and politics.
Chapter 2, “Cancel Culture, Popular Media, and Fandom,” presents
one lineage for cancel practices as they emerged in celebrity and fandom
cultures, focusing on cancellings arising initially due to media content
posted or produced by the cancel targets. Social media platforms are cen-
tral as spaces where relevant content is posted as well as where public fig-
ures and fans interact, with “receipts” of wrongdoing often drawn from
public and private social media posts. In addition, there is significant eco-
nomic value to fan engagement with media content and content produc-
ers online. One kind of popular media cancelling, exemplified by the 2019
case of beauty vlogger James Charles, involves fans judging celebrities for
misbehavior in relation to people around them, typically other celebrities
in instances of interpersonal “drama.” These cancellings result in the loss
of a large number of social media followers, yet the decrease is usually
temporary, and the controversy brings continued views to the cancel tar-
get’s posts as well as generating a large amount of additional discourse that
itself draws views and commentary. A second kind of cancelling arises from
fan activism, such as the fan cancelling of the television series The 100 in
2016 around issues of LGBTQ representation and the 2014 #CancelColbert
campaign spurred by a tweet found problematic in its references to Asians.
The campaign against The 100 also illustrates how clearly fans understood
the financial value of their digital participation, and how they could wield
their collective power to influence data-driven statistics.
Chapter 3, “Cancel Culture, Black Cultural Practice, and Digital
Activism,” traces another lineage for cancelling from Black culture and the
domain of social media activism, as well as identifying seeds of how a
broader critique against “cancel culture” arose. Black digital practices,
especially within what has come to be known as “Black Twitter,” are tied
to older interactional traditions such as “dissing” and “calling out,” to
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

which cancel practices are related. Black musicians, characters, and person-
alities in popular media helped circulate the language of cancelling, with
the confluence of Twitter’s trending topics and hashtag movements such
as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter contributing to the spread of both
cancelling actions and language. The cases of Louis C.K. and James Franco
illustrate how cancelling has played out when prominent individuals have
been accused of serious misconduct. While both C.K. and Franco experi-
enced public condemnation and suffered professional consequences, an
analysis of user commentary about the two men in various digital spaces
reveals more equivocal opinions than initial media coverage and actions
taken by networks and studios would suggest. With a number of ordinary
individuals also suffering cancellings for problematic behavior, the desir-
ability of cancel practices began to be questioned by some liberal com-
mentators and social justice activists. At the same time, it is important to
note that excesses of political expression are not confined to progressive
activism, given the prevalence of hate speech and other far right dis-
course online.
Chapter 4, “Cancel Culture, U.S. Conservatism, and Nation,” dis-
cusses U.S. right-wing criticisms of “cancel culture,” focusing on a major
expansion of these in the wake of the George Floyd protests of 2020, as
well as during the second impeachment of former president Donald
Trump. The analysis identifies how conservatives cast progressive critiques
of racism and structural inequalities as an attack on core American values
and identity, and contextualizes this anti-“cancel culture” discourse within
historical associations between U.S. conservatism, nationalism, and white
supremacist ideologies. In particular, the rise of the alt-right alongside
Trump’s 2016 election campaign and subsequent victory made the
Republican Party’s basis in white identity politics more explicit, and forti-
fied their grievances that they have suffered leftwing victimization. Thus,
conservatives have cited the modification of media texts with racially prob-
lematic representations and the removal of statues of historical American
figures who had engaged in racially oppressive practices as exemplifying
“cancel culture.” In addition, while assessments that cancelling practices
are problematic on free speech grounds have been made by a number of
liberal commentators, particularly with respect to the forced resignations
of editors at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Enquirer, key con-
servatives, in a shift emerging in 2020, have now equated “cancel culture”
with an unconstitutional policing of conservative voices rather than politi-
cal expression more generally.
10 E. NG

Chapter 5, “Cancel Culture and Digital Nationalism in Mainland

China,” considers another context where cancelling and national politics
have become entwined, examining recent cases of individuals, brands, and
media texts being cancelled in the People’s Republic of China after being
deemed to denigrate the Chinese people or the authority of the PRC gov-
ernment. As key background, the chapter outlines a longer history of
nationalism and nationalist protest in the country, shaped by China’s
“Century of Humiliation” experiences with foreign powers in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and the government’s propagation of
nationalist education in the wake of the 1989 student-led protests. Several
major cancel events have involved not just grassroots mobilizations on
social media, but also state commentary, some in support of cancel actions
and other instances seeking to tamp down nationalist outrage. In one case,
the Italian brand Dolce & Gabbana was cancelled after the company and
its co-founder Stephan Gabbana posted content that many observers
found racist and offensive; PRC authorities initially supported the social
media backlash, and then sought to downplay the incident. In 2021, a
number of Western apparel brands were cancelled in mainland China due
to their statements against forced labor in the production of cotton in the
autonomous region of Xinjiang, provoking a nationalistic defense of the
PRC government’s exercise of authority in Xinjiang, which multiple exter-
nal observers have decried as involving major human rights violations.
Controversies over the status of Hong Kong and Taiwan have also led to
cancellations, with one recent case involving a Thai television series,
2gether, and one of its stars, escalating into a nationalist meme war between
Thai and PRC posters, as well as illustrated the phenomenon of “fandom
nationalism,” which the government has at times openly supported when
it aligns with official positions, such as the “One China Principle.”

Notes
1. See Kang (2020).
2. See Koreaboo (2020).
3. Wu (2020).
4. See May and Chien (2020).
5. See You and Lee (2020).
6. Also cut were segments featuring singers Justin Bieber, who had angered
many in mainland China when he posted an Instagram photo in April
2014 posing at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

dead, including convicted war criminals, and Lady Gaga, who had faced
similar sentiments after she met with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual
leader, in June 2016, and is currently banned from touring China as a
performer. See BBC News (2021), Haring (2021).
7. e.g. see Kellner (2014).
8. Besides Dershowitz (2020), see, for example, Donnelly (2021),
Kovalik (2021).
9. Clark (2020), 88.
10. Dershowitz (2020).
11. Jenkins (2021).
12. For example, see Barker and Jane (2016).
13. e.g. see Sloan and Quan-Haase (2017, eds.).
14. Notably, Brock’s (2020) “Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis” is a
multimodal methodology for examining digital technologies in ways that
centers considerations of power and inequality, and I discuss some of
Brock’s research in Chap. 3. See also Murthy (2017).
15. e.g. see Nwanevu (2019), McWhorter (2020).

Bibliography
Barker, Chris, and Emma A. Jane. 2016. An introduction to cultural studies. In
Cultural studies: Theory and practice, 1–43. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
BBC News. 2021. Friends reunion: BTS, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber censored in
China. May 28, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­asia-­china-­
57277952
Brock, André Jr. 2020. Distributed blackness: African American cybercultures.
New York: New York University Press.
Clark, Meredith D. 2020. DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called ‘cancel
culture’. Communication and the Public 5 (3–4): 88–92. https://doi.
org/10.1177/2057047320961562.
Dershowitz, Alan. 2020. Cancel culture: The latest attack on free speech and due
process. New York: Hot Books.
Donnelly, Kevin, ed. 2021. Cancel culture: And the left’s long march. Melbourne:
Wilkinson Publishing.
Haring, Bruce. 2021. ‘Friends’ reunion censored by the Chinese, cutting guest
stars Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and BTS. Deadline, May 28. https://deadline.
com/2021/05/friends-­r eunion-­c hina-­c ensorship-­c utting-­l ady-­g aga-
­justin-­bieber-­bts-­1234766429/
Jenkins, Kristian. 2021. Introduction. In Cancel culture: And the left’s long march,
ed. Kevin Donnelly, 15–21. Melbourne: Wilkinson Publishing.
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Kang, M. 2020. BTS receives James A. Van Fleet Award and delivers speech.
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bts-­receives-­james-­a-­van-­fleet-­award-­and-­delivers-­speech
Kellner, Douglas. 2014. Cultural studies, multiculturalism and media culture. In
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Humez, 6th ed., 7–18. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Koreaboo. 2020. BTS criticized by Chinese netizens after Van Fleet award accep-
tance speech honors USA but puts down China. October 11, 2020. https://
www.koreaboo.com/news/bts-­criticized-­chinese-­netizens-­after-­van-­fleet-­award-
­speech-­honors-­usa-­korea/
Kovalik, Dan. 2021. Cancel this book: The progressive case against cancel culture.
New York: Hot Books.
May, Tiffany, and Amy Chang Chien. 2020. BTS honored Korean War sacrifices.
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nytimes.com/2020/10/12/business/bts-­korean-­war-­china-­samsung.html
McWhorter, John. 2020. Academics are really, really worried about their freedom.
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2020/09/academics-­are-­really-­really-­worried-­about-­their-­freedom/615724/
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study of Twitter. In The SAGE handbook of social media research methods, ed.
Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase, 559–572. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Nwanevu, Osita. 2019. The “cancel culture” con. The New Republic, September
23. https://newrepublic.com/article/155141/cancel-­culture-­con-­dave-
­chappelle-­shane-­gillis
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Wu, Yu. 2020. BTS hurts feelings of Chinese netizens and fans during speech on
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tent/1203151.shtml
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kpop/20201013193400349.html
 CHAPTER 2

Cancel Culture, Popular Media, and Fandom

Abstract This chapter presents one lineage for cancel practices as they
emerged in celebrity and fandom cultures. Social media platforms are cen-
tral as spaces where relevant content is posted as well as where public fig-
ures and fans interact, with “receipts” of wrongdoing often drawn from
public and private social media posts. In addition, there is significant eco-
nomic value to fan engagement with media content and producers online.
One kind of popular media cancelling, exemplified by the 2019 case of
beauty vlogger James Charles, involves fans judging celebrities for misbe-
havior, often in instances of interpersonal “drama.” These cancellings
result in the loss of social media followers, yet the decrease is usually tem-
porary, and the controversy brings continued views to the cancel target’s
posts as well as generating additional discourse that itself draws views and
commentary. A second kind of cancelling arises from fan activism, such as
of the television series The 100 in 2016 around LGBTQ representation
and the 2014 #CancelColbert campaign spurred by a tweet found prob-
lematic in its references to Asians. The campaign against The 100 also illus-
trates how fans understood the financial value of their digital participation,
and how they could wield their collective power to influence data-driven
statistics.

Keywords Celebrity culture • Fan activism • Fan cultures • James

Charles • Stephen Colbert • The 100

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2022
E. Ng, Cancel Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97374-2_2
14 E. NG

Introduction
Ellen Degeneres. Cancelled. J.K. Rowling. Cancelled. Musicians Lana
Del Rey, Demi Lovato, and Lizzo, actors Chris Pratt, Scarlett
Johansson, and Sebastian Stan, YouTubers Logan Paul and James
Charles, TikTok stars Bryce Hall and Zoe Laverne, all cancelled at one
point or another. Actor or author, gay or straight, A-list or D-list—to
many observers, it might seem like anyone could get cancelled for
anything, with the various #[Celebrity-name]iscancelled or
#[Celebrity-name]IsOverParty hashtags confirming the fickleness,
pettiness, and “drama”-heavy character of fan and celebrity culture,
especially as it plays out on social media.
It is true that some cancellings stem from fan perceptions of interper-
sonal slights or insults, such as when a cancel target is deemed to have
acted or spoken badly against someone they were supposed to be friends
with; for example, no longer following someone on social media or post-
ing content disparaging the person, often on a private account, like Demi
Lovato was alleged to have done against Selena Gomez in 2020, sparking
a #DemiIsOverParty hashtag.1 Other celebrity cancellings have arisen
from more problematic conduct, often corroborated by multiple people
or otherwise substantiated. Degeneres, for example, experienced backlash
after revelations in July 2020 by staff who worked on her Ellen talk show
about a toxic workplace, including racist microaggressions. She apolo-
gized, and an investigation by Warner, the show’s production company,
resulted in three senior producers being fired, but within three months
Degeneres had lost over half a million followers on Instagram and more
than 600,000 on Twitter,2 while the season of Ellen that followed ended
up watched by 43% fewer viewers than the season prior.3 Logan Paul faced
condemnation after filming the corpse of a suicide victim in Japan and
uploading the footage as part of his YouTube vlog series in December
2017; he subsequently apologized and pulled the video, but suffered
repercussions from YouTube regarding his channel’s status and future
planned projects, although he actually experienced a net gain of followers
after a few days.4
However, cancellings within popular media and culture are not mono-
lithic in their motivations, characteristics, and trajectories, as an analysis of
three cases involving U.S. media figures will demonstrate in this chapter.
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 15

Sometimes, celebrities suffer temporary losses of followers or viewers, but

the publicity generated by cancel actions may still have value within the
“attention economy.”5 The 2019 cancelling of YouTube influencer James
Charles exemplifies these dynamics, cited at the time as breaking records
for how quickly he lost support on social media platforms, even as the vari-
ous posts, user comments, and other discourses around the cancelling
themselves constituted valuable content (and Charles ultimately more
than recovered his volume of followers). While social media sentiment
does fluctuate, other media-centric cancellings have been based on more
consistently sustained critiques. The 2016 campaign against the television
series The 100 (CW, 2014–2020) is an example of this kind of collective
fan action, as it addressed issues of LGBTQ representation and how the
show’s producers encouraged fan investment in queer storylines. An ear-
lier case, the 2014 #CancelColbert campaign, also arose from the goal of
holding content creators and performers more accountable for the repre-
sentation of traditionally marginalized groups, and was a key point in the
evolution of the language of cancelling.
As will become clear through the book, the lineage to contemporary
“cancel culture” is multi-threaded, and includes a separate history rooted
in Black communicative traditions, which Chap. 3 examines. I start with
the realm of popular media for two reasons. One is because the high pro-
file of cancellings affecting celebrities and entertainment figures has meant
that many such examples have come to epitomize one significant strand of
“cancel culture”; lists of cancelled people inevitably have a high propor-
tion of media celebrities.6 Importantly, from an analytical perspective,
celebrity and popular media cancellings illustrate interactional and finan-
cial elements central to digital cultures. Second, one common meaning of
being “cancelled” (and what used to be the default meaning of this term
in reference to media) refers to a television series ceasing production, and
the #CancelColbert and The 100 cases show how this sense and the emer-
gent meaning of cancelling a person began to overlap. Also worth noting
is that the distinction between cancellings based on assessments of popular
media content, to be discussed in this chapter, and those based on conduct
outside of the media domain, which is the focus of Chap. 3, is by no means
absolute, but it provides a pragmatic way to segment the larger analysis of
the book.
16 E. NG

Digital Engagement, Social Media “Receipts,”

and Collective Fan Actions

Celebrity culture and media fandoms in the U.S. and elsewhere have
undergone major shifts in the last few decades, including with respect to
societal attitudes towards them, their commercialized character, and
modes of participant interaction. For the purposes of this chapter, there
are two important areas to highlight. One is the mainstreaming of media
fandoms, around both media texts and celebrities, in part because earlier
stigmas have been muted by the lucrative appeal of user engagement for
multiple segments of the entertainment industries. Thus, incidents which
in an earlier era might have been ignored or dismissed by mainstream
media now receive significant coverage. The other concerns how digital
media, especially social media platforms, have affected the ways that prom-
inent entertainment figures interact with fans, and how fans interact within
their own communities.
Historically, media fandoms have been subject to ridicule and dismissal,
often in gendered, raced, and classed ways linked partly to the status of the
media texts in question, and partly to who the fans are imagined to be.7
Still, while shades of the “Trekkie” stereotype associated with the 1960s
Star Trek television series remain, fan cultures have become a central part
of commercial entertainment in terms of both media formats and genres
as well as practices. Comics, scifi, fantasy, and video games had previously
been denigrated in mainstream American culture as “geeky” interests, yet
with their potential for immersive and transmedia engagement, became
source material for media franchises that now ground the financial strength
of major Hollywood studios.8 The second “golden age” for television—or
the era of “peak TV”—has also been part of the increased legitimacy of
more-than-casual viewership of other genres such as dramas and come-
dies.9 As for celebrity fandom, old notions that it is primarily the domain
of “teeny bopper” girls have yielded significantly in the wake of celebrity
cultures becoming more visible and normalized, not just for major film,
television, and music stars, but also a plethora of reality television person-
alities, microcelebrities, and social media influencers,10 and I use the term
“celebrity” broadly to include all of these subtypes.
A crucial component of these changes has been media technologies that
have facilitated fan communication, both amongst fans themselves, and
with key figures in the entertainment world to whom access used to be
largely limited to professional journalists and others employed in the
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 17

industry. Henry Jenkins theorized these developments through the frame-

work of “convergence culture,” with the concept of convergence referring
in part to various ways that the traditional producer/consumer boundary
has become more permeable.11 Early forms of online producer/viewer
interactions occurred via message boards; for example, “The Bronze,” run
by the WB network for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/UPN, 1997–2003),
was visited by showrunner Joss Whedon as well as other writers and some
of the actors,12 and television producers have shadowed other message
boards that were fan-run, such as the Television Without Pity forums, to
gauge viewer sentiment.13 However, it was social media, and particularly
in the U.S., Twitter, which further changed the accessibility that fans had
to content producers, actors, and other celebrities,14 where tagging any
Twitter user provides the possibility of a public conversation. Furthermore,
actors and producers of television shows often participate in live tweet ses-
sions during episode airings,15 and social media engagement has become
an important industry measure.16 On the other hand, although social
media discourses contribute to the prominence of a show and its person-
nel, producers and actors are also much more easily held accountable for
what they have said.
This double-edged sword of public prominence and accountability is
also true for celebrity culture, as social media has become key to produc-
ing a public self. Although many posts are no doubt carefully curated,
there are also countless examples that do not seem particularly filtered (or
well-considered). Thus, in terms of content that could provoke cancelling,
social media use means that many problematic comments that previously
might have occurred only in unrecorded conversations end up becoming
a matter of (indefinite digital) public record. In the parlance of social
media gossip, these are “receipts,” i.e. social media posts or “screenshots
of private conversations, photos or videos”17 that provide evidence of
wrongdoing. Sometimes this has led quite quickly to cancel actions, but
often the content is only uncovered by fans some time later, either spurred
by other, more recent actions or criticisms, or because the target has risen
to greater prominence. Also, while a large number of receipts is frequently
presented, a single tweet may be enough to initiate a cancel event.
Digital media has also been transformative for interactions between
fans, who were amongst the first users to take advantage of its affor-
dances for communicating and creating online communities.18 Early
technologies such as email listservs and Yahoo groups, which required
users to sign up, gave way to message boards, as well as platforms such
18 E. NG

as Livejournal, Tumblr, and Twitter that are structured by users fol-

lowing each other’s accounts.19 In addition to discussing their shared
interests, fan communities often organize for a common goal around
the favored media texts, characters, or performers. Fans coordinate
their activities for voting in online contests, and “idol” fandoms in
mainland China, South Korea, and other Asian countries centered on
actors and pop music artists have routinely organized to boost their
idols’ social media rankings and sales.20 For television, many instances
of fan mobilizations have been aimed at saving shows from production
cancellation,21 but with the vastly increased access to producers in the
digital era, especially once social media platforms became ubiquitous,
fan efforts to affect media texts while they are still on air or in produc-
tion have become much more common, particularly for the storylines
of ongoing television series or elements such as casting for films. Some
fan organizing constitutes a form of activism, often motivated by con-
cerns around media representation pertaining to gender and sexuality,
race and ethnicity, and other social hierarchies.22 For example, seg-
ments of the early Star Trek fandom advocated for the series to incor-
porate feminist themes, and engaged in letter-writing efforts for the
inclusion of a gay character.23 Fan activism has also addressed the issue
of race and whitewashed casting24 (even as fandoms themselves have
been critiqued for persistent hierarchies of gender, race, and other
social stratifications25).
Various forms of fan activities constitute labor that is economically valu-
able yet uncompensated, and highlight the commercialization of digital
engagement more generally. For one, online posts help publicize the text
to other potential viewers, thus serving as a form of free promotion, often
to other desirable demographic segments. Furthermore, viewer engage-
ment beyond the act of viewing, such as posting on social media, contrib-
utes to metrics that determine the market value of a media text. In this
vein, for many celebrities, particularly those known primarily on social
media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, a significant component
of their commercial viability is tied to the volume of their followers and
views.26 As the examples in this chapter illustrate, online fan support can
be withdrawn, with observable financial impact. In the legacy media era,
the saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” often applied well to
the celebrity industry, since scandal helped to both drive sales of tabloid
publications and keep someone in the public eye (as long as the conduct
was not so reprehensible as to permanently destroy the celebrity’s allure or
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 19

so disruptive as to adversely affect their employability). This still some-

times holds true for social media influencers and certain kinds of celebri-
ties, like reality show stars; the “drama” of bad behavior can draw video
views, comments, and posts. However, significant losses of followers and
negative online sentiment may also directly drive down the revenue an
influencer earns from a platform, as well as lead to the severing of financial
ties with companies.
Cancelling has some similarities to practices that have been labeled
“anti-fandom” by Jonathan Gray and others.27 At one level, anti-fan activi-
ties are the same as those of fans, such as watching and discussing a media
text, but are motivated by dislike, contempt, and similar sentiments, i.e.
“hate-watching” and sharing opinions with each other or with the pro-
ducers/performers.28 Negative evaluations of media content and person-
nel may be made for a variety of reasons. Gray identified aesthetic (e.g.
disliking the formal elements of a particular genre), moral (e.g. judging a
reality show personality to be a terrible person), and rational-realistic (e.g.
finding a plot point to be unrealistic) elements of texts subject to criticism,
while also recognizing that such judgements are sometimes problemati-
cally informed by racism and/or sexism.29 Anti-fandom has not generally
been theorized in dialogue with the phenomenon of cancelling, but cer-
tain endeavors noted in the literature, such as advocating for an actor to
be fired or a show cancelled,30 are part of the repertoire of actions taken
against cancel targets, as the examples in this chapter demonstrate. At the
same time, not all cancel practices can be completely subsumed by existing
theories of anti-fandom, which are generally concerned with the phenom-
enon of dislike or hate undergirding users’ continued engagement with a
media text rather than them abandoning it.
It is also important to point out that expressions of dislike online,
whether occurring as explicit cancelling actions or not, can be motivated
by discriminatory attitudes and emotions against social groups on the
basis of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and other identity categories, i.e.
the “hate” of “hate crimes.” In seeking to distinguish anti-fandom from
this, Gray (2021) argued that “Hate … desires to eliminate people and
wishes physical and/or psychological damage and trauma on them … By
contrast, engaged dislike gives voice to a potential wealth of other griev-
ances that are about texts, representational systems, and ethics … [that]
are not concerned with group elimination or traumatization” (p. 7).
However, as Gray acknowledged, in practice the motivations of people
involved in anti-fan discourses may be mixed—for example, some of the
20 E. NG

anti-fans of Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, an African American woman

who was a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice (NBC,
2004–2017), may have disliked her for characteristics unrelated to her
gender or race, but other anti-fans were clearly misogynist and/or racist. I
recognize this tension in analyzing “cancel culture” as well, but also draw
a distinction in principle between, on the one hand, practices that center
on withdrawing attention and support from and/or expressing a repudia-
tion of the target (e.g. “You’re cancelled”), from those that involve hate
language or other forms of harassment such as doxxing, i.e. the publica-
tion of someone’s address and contact information to promote harass-
ment and intimidation. Still, both kinds of practices may be at play within
a particular cancel event; as the #CancelColbert campaign later in the
chapter illustrates, hate-driven harassment was directed not at the cancel
target, Stephen Colbert, but rather, against the initiator of the campaign.

Celebrity Cancellings: The 2019 James Charles-Tati

Westbrook Feud
Before his 2019 cancelling, James Charles exemplified the heights to
which a social media influencer could rise. He rapidly gained followers
after starting a YouTube channel for makeup tutorials in 2015 at the age
of 16 and an Instagram account the year after. In 2016 he became
CoverGirl’s first male brand ambassador—the makeup company called
him their “CoverBoy”—after his tweet of his high school portrait session
went viral. By 2019, he had over 16 million subscribers on YouTube and
well over 10 million followers on Instagram, a personally branded product
line, and lucrative endorsement deals with make up companies. He had
worked with even more famous celebrities such as Kylie Jenner and Kim
Kardashian to promote their products on his YouTube channel, and
attended the 2019 MetGala fashion event in New York as a VIP guest of
YouTube.
Another beauty vlogger, Tati Westbrook, who had established her
YouTube channel in 2010 and a vitamin company in 2018, became a men-
tor and close friend of Charles early on. However, conflict arose over
Charles posting an Instagram promotion on April 22, 2019 of Sugar Bear
Hair products, a rival health supplement company to Westbrook’s; that
day, Westbrook posted an Instagram story, commenting that “Everybody
says what they need to say and uses who they need to use, and I have had
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 21

about enough.” On May 4, Charles posted an Instagram apology to

Westbrook, and sought to explain why he had posted the Sugar Bear Hair
promotion. The most explosive post of the saga was Westbrook’s
42-­minute May 10 YouTube video, in which she accused Charles not just
of dishonesty and betrayal as well as taking advantage of her and her hus-
band’s support (she rejected his May 4 explanation as lies), but also of
pressuring straight men for sexual interactions, and threatening to “embar-
rass” or “ruin” men if they spurned him.31 Charles responded on YouTube
on the same day, apologizing to Tati and James Westbrook, although he
did not clearly address the allegations of sexual misconduct.32
In the immediate aftermath, Charles lost a record number of YouTube
subscribers—1 million in less than 24 hours and 3 million in just a few
days—and multiple high profile celebrity followers, such Kylie Jenner, the
Kardashian sisters, and pop stars Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande,
Demi Lovato, Shawn Mendes, and Katy Perry, unfollowed him on
Instagram. Social media users posted a large number of negative com-
ments on Charles’ accounts—the most popular ones garnered tens of
thousands of likes and retweets33—and uploaded videos of themselves,
often first on Tiktok but then additionally circulated on Twitter, destroy-
ing his signature eyeshadow palette in various ways.34 Conversely,
Westbrook gained subscribers, at one point reaching 10 million on
YouTube when she had less than 6 million prior to the controversy,
although she followed up with a May 17 video asking people to stop
“picking sides,” saying that “I don’t want you guys to subscribe. I don’t
want you to feel bad for me, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. … I
don’t need ‘Team Tati’.” There were also other financially significant con-
sequences for Charles. He took down the website for his personal brand
merchandise, giving the reason that product distribution was tied up with
another beauty influencer, Jeffree Star, who had spoken against Charles
after Westbrook’s video. Charles also cancelled a planned multi-venue
tour, the most expensive tickets for which had been selling for hundreds
of dollars.
However, over the next year, Charles bounced back both in terms of
followers and income earned for the brands he endorsed. For example, the
influencer data company Tribe Dynamics estimated that for the Morphe
cosmetics company, the earned media value Charles generated dropped
from $1.8 million in April 2019 to $460,200 in May (the month
Westbrook posted her video), but then recovered to $1.4 million in June.35
By the beginning of 2021, he had over 25 million subscribers on YouTube,
22 E. NG

over 25 million followers on Instagram, and over 33 million on Tiktok.36

Thus, the case seemed to confirm the ephemeral character of cancel actions
against celebrities. Still, in February 2021, several teenage boys under the
age of 18 accused Charles of sexting with them, and this latest controversy
has resulted in Morphe severing its relationship with Charles, YouTube
removing Charles as the host for Instant Influencer, a reality competition
show that he had hosted for the first season in 2020, as well as Charles’
YouTube channel being demonetized.37 However, Charles did not lose
subscribers and followers to any degree resembling his 2019 cancelling.
In considering the characteristics of social media and digital culture,
Charles’ 2019 cancelling demonstrates one way that collective action
online may be initiated and develop: arising from fan assessments about a
conflict between highly popular celebrities, many fans withdrew their sup-
port for Charles by unfollowing him and/or posting their views about the
events. Yet even as Charles lost social media followers, the videos he posted
about the controversy continued to attract large numbers of views. Thus,
in terms of the outcomes of “bad publicity,” there were some parallels to
how celebrity scandals unfolded in the era of legacy media. Westbrook’s
May 10 video drew over 40 million views before she deleted it, and
Charles’ first apology video also garnered over 40 million views in just a
few days (although it also had over two million downvotes).38 Indeed,
interpersonal “drama” amongst social media influencers playing out pub-
licly is common, and the back-and-forth accusatory and apology videos, as
well as commentary videos by celebrity culture observers, have become a
staple form of entertainment themselves,39 a kind of meta-reality show
that may involve viewer “hate-watching” that contributes value to the
content producers and the platforms hosting them. Furthermore, some
viewers produce content themselves: Westbrook’s and Charles’ Instagram
posts and YouTube videos, for example, generated a huge amount of addi-
tional discourse that was in turn read or watched and responded to.
However, not all cancellings within popular media follow this kind of
trajectory. In particular, there have been a number arising from fans hold-
ing content creators accountable not for their interactions with other
celebrities, but for issues around media representation, and sometimes, for
their interactions with fans themselves. The next section, examining the
2016 fan cancelling of the television series The 100 and the 2014
#CancelColbert campaign, illustrates a different set of circumstances from
which cancel actions emerged, as well as goals, practices, and outcomes
distinct from celebrity cancellings like that of James Charles.
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 23

Fandom Activist Cancellings: The 100

and #CancelColbert

In March 2016, the death of a character called Lexa on The 100, a sci-fi
television series on the youth-oriented CW network, sparked intense fan
outrage. Prior to that mid-third season episode (3.07), the show and its
executive producer, Jason Rothenberg, had earned both fan enthusiasm
and positive mainstream media coverage for introducing Lexa in the sec-
ond season as an important recurring character who was revealed to be a
lesbian in a matter-of-fact way and soon after, as a love interest for the
show lead, Clarke, after they kissed briefly in a late Season 2 episode. While
LGBTQ representation in the mid-2010s had improved markedly com-
pared to even a few years prior, at the time, there were still very few lesbian
or bisexual women as lead characters on U.S. television series, and the
promise of a Clarke/Lexa pairing (quickly acquiring the portmanteau
name of “Clexa”) was especially attractive to fans looking for queer female
representation.
Over the second half of Season 2 and the first half of Season 3,
Rothenberg and several of the shows writers actively courted LGBTQ
fans. This included retweeting favorable press articles about Clarke, Lexa,
and queer representation, posting Twitter responses to fan questions that
suggested that the two would have a happy ending, most likely leaking
their Season 2 kiss before the episode aired, visiting a popular lesbian
entertainment message board (The L Chat) to further bolster fan invest-
ment in Clarke and Lexa’s storyline, and misleading fans into thinking
Lexa survived the whole season by inviting fans to come view the filming
of the finale, where they saw both Eliza Taylor (Clarke) and Alycia
Debnam-Carey (Lexa) in scenes together.40 After building fan hope and
excitement in these ways, Lexa was killed just after she and Clarke made
love for the first time, in a way very much reminiscent of the death of
another lesbian character that had also devastated many queer female fans,
Tara on a 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both died after a long-­
awaited romantic (re)union, from being struck by a stray bullet meant for
the lead character, thus instantiating a “Bury Your Gays” trope that had
shadowed LGBTQ characters on American film and television for much of
the twentieth century due to Hollywood censorship policy.
Beyond what had occurred onscreen, the depth and scope of negative
response to Lexa’s death occurred in large part because the show produc-
ers and writers had interacted with the fandom through social media in
24 E. NG

unprecedented ways for the representation of a queer relationship. This

was ultimately re-interpreted as unconscionable “queerbaiting” once Lexa
was killed off, a phenomenon involving “those officially associated with a
media text court[ing] viewers interested in LGBT narratives” to watch
and engage with the text, only to have the narrative ultimately fall far short
of the expectations built up for satisfying queer representation.41 A set of
fans quickly screenshotted thousands of relevant tweets, Tumblr posts,
message board posts, promotional materials, and other related communi-
cations by Rothenberg and other writers on The 100 with viewers or public
statements about the show, organized these chronologically and by topic,
and posted them with detailed explanations and a critical analysis at a dedi-
cated “We Deserved Better” website.42 This occurred in the manner of
collating social media “receipts” associated with celebrity cancellings, but
rather than being concerned with interpersonal betrayals between celebri-
ties, this data comprised producer-fan interactions deemed retrospectively
to be problematic, dating as far back as December 2014. Particularly
damning were a slew of posts by Rothenberg and others on The 100 cre-
ative team after they would have already known that Lexa had died on the
show, yet still encouraging Clarke/Lexa fans to stay invested in their sto-
ryline, and positioning themselves and the show as championing LGBTQ
representation.
Alongside this documentation, a number of fans began organizing a
campaign against The 100, as well as to more broadly publicize the impor-
tance of responsible LGBTQ media representation. In terms of cancel
actions, fans worked to negatively affect the show’s social media promi-
nence, Nielsen viewership ratings, viewer-voted episode ratings on sites
such as imdb.com, and advertiser commitments. On Twitter, this included
unfollowing all the official accounts of the show; thus, Jason Rothenberg,
who had over 120,000 followers prior to the airing of 3.07, lost 10,000
within 24 hours of Lexa’s death.43 Some of the tweets directed to
Rothenberg and other writers, including Shawna Benson, who had posted
on The L Chat message board, were personally abusive, and, in the case of
Rothenberg, a derogatory “JRat” nickname that some posters used for
him had possible anti-Semitic animus.44 However, overall, the fan cam-
paign, which called for an indefinite social media “blackout,” advocated
for ceasing engagement with Rothenberg and anyone on The 100 produc-
tion team (by and large, this did not extend to punishing the actors).
Thus, participants also stopped using the hashtag #The100, even when
expressing negative views of the series, substituting variants such as
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 25

#The1OO, which has a lower-case letter “l” instead of the numeral “1”
and two upper-case “O” letters for the two 0 numerals.45 They urged The
100’s viewers to stop watching, and ratings for the 3.08 episode did show
a larger dip compared to 3.07 than between any other two episodes for
Season 3, although some of this could have been due to normal ratings
fluctuations across a season.46 The imdb.com viewer-voted ratings for
3.07, at 6.2/10, are the lowest for any Season 3 episode.47 Another effort
involved asking companies with ad placements during The 100’s airings to
pull their spots, which met with limited success; notably, Maybelline cos-
metics initially tweeted its support and suggested it would no longer be
advertising on the show, but a few weeks later, it backtracked.48
Ultimately, there was no observable impact on Rothenberg’s career,
and nor did The 100 get cancelled; it ran for four more seasons after Season
3, and Rothenberg remained its executive producer. However, the longer-­
term significance of the fan campaign is evident through the more affirma-
tive actions to raise awareness of the issues. Participating fans successfully
trended a number of hashtags on Twitter in the weeks after Lexa’s death,
especially #Lexa, #Clexa, and #LGBTFansDeserveBetter, as well as
#LexaDeservedBetter and #MinoritiesAreNotDisposable, and the LGBT
Viewers Deserve Better fan group raised enough money to “place large,
rainbow-themed billboards near prominent Hollywood offices (The
CW’s, for instance) that featured statistics about the BYG [Bury Your
Gays] trope.”49 The fan backlash and critique also received what was then
unprecedented mainstream media coverage about Lexa’s death and the
deficiencies of LGBTQ representation, including articles in major industry
publications such as Variety50 as well as news outlets such as the BBC and
the Washington Post.51 Outside the media domain, there was a successful
fundraising effort for The Trevor Project, a U.S. suicide prevention orga-
nization serving LGBTQ youth, which quickly raised tens of thousands of
dollars, and eventually well over $150,000.52
In some ways, this fan campaign looked like what has been theorized as
anti-fandom, motivated as it was by strong dislike of the text. However,
anti-fandom scholarship is typically concerned with fans who engage with
media texts despite and indeed, on the basis of, their dislike, contempt etc.
Thus, Jonathan Gray defined “bad object” anti-fans as those who enjoy
hating particular performers, for example, as well as “disappointed anti-­
fandom,” where some aspects of a media text are found to be problematic,
but the anti-fans continue to watch or discuss it.53 Still, the fans who were
part of the cancelling campaign against Rothenberg and The 100 could be
26 E. NG

considered examples of disappointed anti-fandom if the object of engage-

ment isn’t a particular media text, but media texts more generally. From
this perspective, these fans were indeed still engaged, but with popular
media and issues of media representation more generally, as their goal was
to help achieve more industry-wide changes in LGBTQ representation,
versus simply campaigning for changes on a single show.
In terms of the emergence of the language of cancelling, the fan actions
against The 100 and Jason Rothenberg were clearly a coordinated cancel-
ling campaign, but in early 2016, using “cancel” to refer to a person had
not yet become as widely used (although, as Chap. 3 notes, it had begun
circulating within “Black Twitter” in 2014). Thus, while references to
“cancelled” and “cancelling” showed up in the Twitter discourse, they
invariably meant hoping that the show would get cancelled, rather than
referring to Rothenberg (or any other writer for The 100) as the object of
cancelling.54 It is instructive to compare this with the 2014 #CancelColbert
campaign, which was the first prominent effort to highlight problems of
media representation that incorporated “cancel” in a hashtag, and although
the meaning of the term still referred primarily to the show as its object, it
could also be understood to have a person as the target.
The Colbert Report, airing on the U.S. cable network Comedy Central
from 2005–2014, was a satirical news program starring comedian Stephen
Colbert as a fictionalized “Stephen Colbert” who was a conservative news
anchor, and The Colbert Report was intended to lampoon real-life news
programs on networks such as Fox News. On a March 26, 2014 episode,
Colbert reported on a real piece of news: Dan Snyder, owner of the
Washington Redskins NFL football team,55 had established a non-profit
foundation for Native American people called the “Washington Redskins
Original Americans Foundation.” The football team had faced long-time
criticism for using “Redskin” in their name, a term offensive to many
Native Americans. To mock the juxtaposition of “Redskins” on the one
hand with “Original Americans” and a purported mission to advocate for
Native Americans on the other, Colbert, in his Colbert Report persona,
proposed establishing the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for
Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” This name also contained an incon-
gruous pairing of racial slurs and problematic terms of reference to a racial
group—in this case Asians—with an announced intent to advocate on
behalf of that group, and “‘or whatever’ indicates utter indifference
regarding what Asians prefer to be called.”56 On March 27, The Colbert
Report’s official Twitter account followed up on this joke by tweeting, “I
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 27

am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing The Ching-­

Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”
A Twitter user, Suey Park, responded, “The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong
Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for
#CancelColbert. Trend it,” along with “#CancelColbert because white
liberals are just as complicit in making Asian Americans into punchlines
and we aren’t amused.” Park had spurred social media commentary on
race before this, for her December 2013 #NotYourAsianSidekick hashtag,
which she intended to generate dialogue for “Asian-American, Pacific
Islander and Native Hawaiian women to critique patriarchy in Asian
American spaces and [the] racism of white feminism.”57 #CancelColbert
did in fact trend, becoming one of Twitter’s top five hashtags for 36 hours
after its first post, and generating nearly 50,000 tweets in 10 days.58 It thus
became one of the first prominent “cancel” hashtags, involving a well-­
known entertainment figure and a controversy centered on race.
In almost every use, the meaning of “cancel” in the hashtag referred to
the cancelling of The Colbert Report. For example, Suey Park commented
in an interview that she wasn’t trying to get the show cancelled,59 and
other comments on Twitter used “cancel” in the same way. This was also
true of longer commentary pieces; for example, one defending Colbert
wrote that “we shouldn’t call for the cancellation of a TV series or the fir-
ing of a person for minor mistakes, particularly if the reasons that aren’t
heartfelt or as minor as differing opinions.”60 Still, because the show and
Colbert were so tied together—he was its star and the show was named for
him—there was a close alignment between calling for the cancellation of
The Colbert Report and advocating for actions against Colbert himself. In
addition, in Colbert’s response to the controversy in the next episode of
the show, on March 31, he used “cancel” to refer to people twice. Once
was in joking that the author Jonathan Swift should be cancelled for his
1729 satirical novel, A Modest Proposal, which outrageously suggests that
impoverished Irish people sell their children to the rich as food; Colbert
commented, “Hashtag #CancelSwift. Trend it.” Second, noting that he
was recording the show on Monday after not doing so since Thursday (the
show followed a Monday-Thursday schedule), Colbert said that in this
sense, “I was cancelled, for three days. Just like Jesus.”61
Many early participants in the Twitter conversation were supportive of
Park’s critique. For example, De Kosnik (2019) noted the tweets “I can
get behind this. ‘Ironic’ oppressive ‘jokes’ aren’t funny and still oppress.
#CancelColbert,” and “Using satire that ‘ironically’ ridicules Asians = not
28 E. NG

productive for indigenous nor any marginalized group. White humor

blows #CancelColbert” (p. 204). However, a large proportion of other
tweets were defenses of Colbert, making the point that he was actually
being critical of racism through his satirical performance, and denigrating
Colbert’s critics for being unable to get the joke. One of the more civil
tweets in this vein was “#CancelColbert has been great for flushing out
everyone on the internet that doesn’t understand what satire is.”62 There
was some pushback on this; thus, Dan Fishback, a white playwright,
tweeted, “If I see anti-racist satire, but huge numbers of POC see racism,
then I have a serious responsibility to consider that I might be wrong.”63
The overall tenor on social media and other online commentary, however,
was that Park and her supporters were, at best, well-intentioned but frus-
tratingly foolish for not appreciating the satirical character of the offend-
ing tweet and of Colbert in general. A large amount of critique was much
more virulent, with some espousing the kind of racist and sexist abuse that
other women of color have faced when expressing sociopolitical criticism
online.64
As it happened, two weeks after Park’s first #CancelColbert tweet,
CBS announced that Colbert would replace long-time host David
Letterman on the network’s late night show The Late Show, which meant
that The Colbert Report ended up wrapping its final season at the end of
2014. However, this constituted a move for Colbert to a program with
even greater prominence, leading some critics of #CancelColbert to note
gleefully that this was surely not what its proponents had intended.
Conversely, Park was subject to doxxing alongside the online abuse, and,
with her address and contact details posted publicly, felt so unsafe that
she moved cities and used only burner phones instead of her old cell
phone.65 Thus, while the #CancelColbert campaign had the language
and initial outlines of numerous later cancellings within the popular
media realm, it ended up not so much demonstrating the power of col-
lective fan action so much as underscoring how relative positions of (dis)
empowerment of participants in such events along the dimensions of
gender, race, and intersecting social hierarchies often inform the out-
comes. As Jane (2019) argued in discussing online fan discourses, schol-
ars have often theorized audiences “as having an agency that is subtle,
idiosyncratic, and possibly even an admirable form of ‘punching up’ to
hegemons,” yet it is also crucial to recognize that such agency includes
“their power to cause harm” (pp. 56–57).
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 29

Conclusion
Individuals known in popular media and culture have been many of the
most prominent targets of cancelling in the last few years, and this chapter
outlined cases where cancel actions were initially spurred by media content
posted or produced by these individuals. Two major kinds of cancelling
were distinguished: those arising from fans turning against a celebrity after
they were deemed to have behaved poorly to another celebrity (interper-
sonal “drama”), and those associated with fan activism around issues of
media representation. For both types of cancelling, digital media, particu-
larly social media platforms, has been central, as spaces of interaction
amongst public figures and fans and as a repository of undeletable digital
discourses, which may end up as evidential “receipts” during cancel
actions. Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and, most recently, TikTok
are also crucial for hosting the content many celebrities produce apart
from interactional discourses, and thus are how they derive much of their
income. For fan activists, the platforms are spaces to both communicate
and where various actions themselves take place, particularly through
hashtagged posts and practices such as unfollowing.
Mainstream criticisms of cancellings within popular media often focus
on the fickleness of fan sentiment and the ineffectiveness of cancel actions,
given that certain public figures have been cancelled multiple times and
repeatedly reemerge. This chapter examined the case of beauty vlogger
James Charles not to prove those critiques correct, although they do apply
to Charles, but because cancelling events illustrate important characteris-
tics of how social media celebrity is influenced and sustained by fan activi-
ties, certainly outside of cancel events, but also, in some ways, during
them, because of the continued views and digital discourses they generate.
Cancellings associated with fan activism around problematic media repre-
sentations are different from this when the actions called for involve a
deliberate, organized disengagement from the media text targeted, as was
the case for the fan cancelling of The 100. Although there was little long-­
term negative effect for the show and executive producer Jason Rothenberg,
such practices reflect fan savviness of the economic value of their digital
participation, as well as demonstrating that cancelling events do not neces-
sarily involve the capricious whims of an online mob. Indeed, cancel par-
ticipants may not have the upper hand at all, as the #CancelColbert
campaign demonstrated; most social media commentators posted in sup-
port of Stephen Colbert, while the attacks that initiator Suey Park faced
underscored the pervasiveness of misogyny and racism online. There was
30 E. NG

a broader reckoning around issues of race and media representation dur-

ing and after the George Floyd protests of 2020, as Chap. 4 discusses,
which was also a point when cancel practices and discourses had become
much more widespread.
This chapter considered only U.S. examples, but, unsurprisingly, can-
celling has occurred within popular media elsewhere.66 Furthermore, the
mainstreaming of media fandom has contributed to the spread of cancel
practices and discourses to domains beyond entertainment and celebrity
culture. As Chap. 5 will address, fandoms in mainland China have been a
significant force in several cancelling events arising from nationalist con-
troversies against both domestic and foreign targets, comprising phenom-
ena that have been labeled “digital nationalism” and “fandom nationalism,”
and illustrating another facet of the politics of “cancel culture.”
Finally, in terms of the language of cancelling, the 2014 #CancelColbert
campaign was one of the earliest prominent uses of “cancel” in a hashtag,
though it was still primarily understood to mean the cancellation of
Stephen Colbert’s late night show, occurring as it did on the cusp of when
the term “cancel” was becoming more widely used to refer to people. The
fan campaign against The 100 occurred in early 2016, and did not use this
later sense of “cancel,” even though multiple actions taken epitomize how
popular media cancellings played out in later instances. By the time of
James Charles’ 2019 cancelling, the language was well-established, and
posts about the saga included numerous memes incorporating the word
“cancel.” However, the origins of the term, within Black interactional
practices predating social media, were earlier than any of these examples,
which the next chapter details.

Notes
1. e.g. see Gatollari (2020).
2. e.g. see JT’s World (2020). This still left Degeneres with over 92 million
Instagram followers and 79 million Twitter followers.
3. Koblin (2021). Ratings for other daytime talk shows also dropped, but not
by nearly as much.
4. e.g. see Jarvey (2018), Kaplan (2018).
5. The term was originated by Goldhaber (1997) and has been further devel-
oped by other scholars, such as Tufekci (2013).
6. e.g. see Bryant (2018), Vera (2019).
7. e.g. see Scott (2019).
8. See Perren and Felschow (2018).
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 31

9. See Newman and Levine (2012).

10. See Marwick and boyd (2011).
11. Jenkins (2006).
12. See Ali (2013).
13. See Andrejevic (2008). Television Without Pity was purchased by the
NBC-owned Bravo network in 2007, but prior to that, was fan-run; it
became inactive in 2014.
14. See Marwick and boyd (2011), Chin (2013).
15. The first show to do so with significant success was the youth-oriented
drama Pretty Little Liars (ABC Family, 2010–2017) and then executive
producer Shonda Rhimes’ Thursday evening block of programs on ABC;
see Prudom (2017), Patterson (2018).
16. See Napoli and Kosterich (2017).
17. Safronova (2019), para. 8.
18. See Coppa (2006).
19. See Stein (2018).
20. See Jung (2011), Zhang and Negus (2020). In July 2021, the mainland
Chinese government began a crackdown against idol fandoms; e.g. see
Yuan (2021).
21. See Savage (2014).
22. Some fan groups have overlapped with broader movements for social
change, or explicitly directed their activism beyond the media domain; see
Jenkins and Shresthova (2012).
23. See Tulloch and Jenkins (1995).
24. e.g. see Lopez (2011).
25. See Scott (2019), Pande (2018).
26. e.g. see Hearn and Schoenhoff (2016).
27. See Gray (2005, 2021), Click (2019).
28. See Andrejevic (2008).
29. More generally, as Click (2019) has discussed, criticisms of media texts,
performers, and other popular media figures can stem from antipathy
towards groups who have been traditionally marginalized, and occur
within a broader digital environment of misogyny, homophobia, and racism.
30. Williams (2018).
31. Westbrook deleted the video, but it can be viewed elsewhere, e.g. Tea
Bixch. Tati Westbrook’s ‘BYE SISTER’ orignal [sic] video. YouTube, May
20, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-­SQZoZatXM
32. e.g. see Rodulfo and Walsh (2020).
33. e.g. Beans After Dark (@goodbeanalt). “James Charles being cancelled by
the entire internet in a day is the modern version of Caesar being stabbed
23 times by the Roman senate but much funnier.” Twitter, May 11, 2019.
https://twitter.com/goodbeanalt/status/1127327329347350528 had
over 170,000 likes and over 20,000 retweets.
32 E. NG

34. e.g. see Kesslen (2019), Safronova (2019).

35. See Flora (2021).
36. See Social Blade statistics at https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/james-
charles/monthly; https://socialblade.com/instagram/user/james-
charles/monthly; https://socialblade.com/tiktok/user/jamescharles/
monthly
37. e.g. see Lorenz and Safronova (2021).
38. See Safronova (2019).
39. See Safronova (2019).
40. Clarke was actually in a virtual world, and Lexa was only digitally present,
with her body already cremated earlier in the season.
41. Ng (2017), para. [1.2].
42. http://wedeservedbetter.com/, the content of which was later moved to
a Tumblr account at https://lexawasdeadalready.tumblr.com. See also
Ryan (2016).
43. Cranz (2016).
44. See Guerrero-Pico, Establés, and Ventura (2018), 323.
45. e.g. see Clexa Source Archive (@clexasource). “[UPDATE] ‘Lexa’ is still a
world wide trending topic while #the1OO disappeared hours ago.”
Twitter, March 4. https://twitter.com/clexasource/status/70571731
4856067072
46. See TV Series Finale (2016). Episode 3.08, which aired after “Thirteen,”
posted a 0.42 Nielsen rating in the 18–49 demographic, which was a 17%
drop compared to episode 3.07, and drew 1.2 million viewers, a drop of
more than 13% compared to the week before. However, the week after, the
show experienced a viewership gain, and the season ended with a 0.47 rat-
ing in the 18–49 demographic.
47. See https://www.imdb.com/list/ls031960130/. The highest-rated
Season 3 episode is 3.06, with 8.9.
48. See Steinberg (2016).
49. Bridges (2018), 128–129; see also Hogan (2016).
50. See Ryan (2016).
51. See BBC Trending (2016), Butler (2016).
52. See https://give.thetrevorproject.org/fundraiser/625415
53. Gray (2019).
54. For example, see search results for tweets addressed to Rothenberg con-
taining the term “canceled”/“cancelled”: https://twitter.com/search?q=
cancelled%20(to%3AJRothenbergTV)&src=typed_query, https://twitter.
com/search?q=canceled%20(to%3AJRothenbergTV)&src=typed_query
55. The team removed its Redskins name in 2020, and was known as the
Washington Football Team until it selected the new name of Commanders,
announced in February 2022.
 2 CANCEL CULTURE, POPULAR MEDIA, AND FANDOM 33

56. De Kosnik (2019), 204.

57. Loza (2014), para. 41.
58. See De Kosnik (2019), 204.
59. See Kang (2014), para. 11.
60. Monji (2014), para. 32.
61. Comedy Central. The Colbert Report—Who’s attacking me now?—
#CancelColbert. YouTube, April 1, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=MBPgXjkfBXM
62. Mikeal Rogers (@mikeal). “#CancelColbert has been great for flushing out
everyone on the internet that doesn’t understand what satire is.” Twitter,
March 31, 2014. https://twitter.com/mikeal/status/45070027839
6751872. Many were more abusive in tone, with De Kosnik (2019, 204)
giving the example of one which said, “Anyone who actually wants Colbert
cancelled is a fucking idiot who has absolutely no understanding of satire.”
63. Dan Fishback (@dangerfishback). “If I see anti-racist satire, but huge num-
bers of POC see racism, then I have a serious responsibility to consider that
I might be wrong.” Twitter, March 29, 2014. https://twitter.com/dan-
gerfishback/status/449919804544409600
64. See Cross (2014).
65. See Mishan (2020), para. 9.
66. e.g. see Velasco (2020) for a case study of celebrity cancelling in the
Philippines.

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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
que celui qui les révèle est enchaîné à la volonté du premier
éléphant qu’il voit.
Aussi, je ne les reproduis pas, car on ne sait jamais ce qui peut
advenir dans le domaine des choses cachées, mais je me gardai
intérieurement d’une sotte crédulité.
A quelque temps de là, on me proposa d’acheter un éléphant
appelé Jéhovah qui passait pour avoir une nature assez rebelle et
qui était couleur de cendres, ce qui lui donnait une grande valeur. On
me l’amena, et je prononçai machinalement devant lui la formule du
Panikia. A ma grande surprise, il plia aussitôt les genoux devant moi
en faisant entendre un barrissement amical.
Le cornac, qui devait être d’une nature jalouse, se hâta de me
dire que ce ploiement de genoux était la seule chose qu’il avait pu
apprendre à l’animal. J’attribuai cette révérence de Jéhovah au fait
qu’il avait reconnu un maître en ma personne et je l’achetai.
Ce Jéhovah rebelle et cendré s’attacha à moi de façon singulière.
Il faisait entendre des plaintes quand je le quittais et lorsque
j’apparaissais au seuil du hangar qui était son habitation il se livrait à
des manifestations de joie extraordinaire qui ressemblaient presque
à des danses.
Je pris l’habitude de ne sortir dans Singapour que sur son dos et
comme il obéissait à mes moindres mots et me comprenait à
merveille, je ne me faisais pas accompagner d’un cornac.
L’amour que Jéhovah me portait, l’étonnante intelligence qu’il
manifestait pour obéir à mes ordres devinrent vite célèbres et me
flattèrent tout d’abord. Mais il arriva que lorsque je descendais, vers
six heures, parmi les cavaliers et les calèches à parasol, la grande
avenue de palmiers qui mène à l’hôtel du résident, j’entendais de ma
houdah de soie rouge, le nom de Jéhovah mêlé au mien dans la
bouche des gens du menu peuple.
Cette sorte d’égalité dans la célébrité me déplut et je pris
l’habitude de piquer de l’aiguillon mon éléphant toutes les fois que
son nom résonnait à mes oreilles à côté du mien.
 Ce traitement ne l’irrita pas parce qu’il venait de son maître bien-
aimé et il le supporta avec patience.
Un jour que je traversais le faubourg chinois pour atteindre, par la
route qui longe la rivière, la hauteur de Bukit-Timah qui forme la
partie encore inculte de Singapour, des enfants qui jouaient
s’écartèrent en m’apercevant et s’écrièrent :
— Voilà Jéhovah ! l’éléphant couleur de cendres !
Moi, le maître, je ne comptais plus. Je n’étais plus rien. Je
passais sur ma houdah rouge et l’on ne voyait qu’un éléphant
cendré, l’on criait : Voilà un éléphant qui passe !
J’étais parti dans l’espoir de tirer quelques lynx et j’avais emporté
ma carabine à balles. Dès que la route s’enfonça sous les bois, je
poussai Jéhovah qui se mit à trotter en barrissant joyeusement et en
faisant l’effort de tourner parfois la tête dans l’espoir de m’apercevoir
avec son petit œil amical.
Je plaçai l’extrémité de ma carabine sous son oreille. Je savais
exactement quel point je devais viser pour frapper l’animal à mort
d’une manière instantanée. Je savais aussi que je risquais ma vie,
car je pouvais être écrasé par la chute de l’énorme corps. Mais la vie
comptait peu pour moi et j’avais du plaisir à la risquer.
Non, les enfants ne nommeraient plus à son passage le célèbre
Jéhovah. La célébrité était faite pour les hommes, non pour les
bêtes.
Je tirai. L’éléphant sut-il que c’était son maître qui le frappait ou
pensa-t-il confusément que la mort lui venait par une fatalité
incompréhensible ?
Il ne fut pas préoccupé par ce problème dans la dernière
seconde dont il disposa et pour moi seul fut sa sollicitude. A peine le
coup avait-il retenti que Jéhovah en s’affaissant projetait sa trompe
en arrière, m’enlaçait et me déposait doucement sur le sol du côté
opposé à la chute de son corps. Une seule seconde, dans laquelle il
y avait l’infini du dévouement.
 O Seigneur, si tu existes quelque part, garde l’homme de la
croyance qu’il a le droit de tuer les animaux selon son bon plaisir, de
la force qui le pousse à faire dégringoler des ailes dans les arbres, à
tacher de sang des fourrures dans la forêt, délivre-le de la folie de la
chasse, de la tyrannie qu’il exerce sur le peuple à quatre pattes et
sur le peuple couvert de plumes, délivre-le de l’orgueil qui lui fait
penser qu’il est le roi de la création, délivre-le du mal qui est en lui.
 LA VISITE DE MONSIEUR MUHCIN

Monsieur Muhcin vint me voir.

Il avait été l’ami de mon père et j’honorais, depuis mon enfance,
ce petit marchand d’éventails, pour sa probité, sa douceur et sa
modestie. Je ne lui trouvais qu’un seul ridicule : celui d’être
bouddhiste, mais je l’excusais, pensant que cela tenait à son origine
hindoue.
C’était un homme maigre et pâle avec des yeux sans éclat
remplis de bonté et une longue barbiche jaunâtre. Il avait beaucoup
vieilli depuis que je ne l’avais vu. Cela tenait, m’expliqua-t-il, à sa
santé qui n’était pas excellente.
Je l’avais fait entrer dans le grand salon de réception et sous les
immenses panoplies qui recouvraient les murailles, sous les armures
chinoises et cinghalaises, avec son dos voûté, et sa tête projetée en
avant, il avait l’air encore plus petit, encore plus insignifiant. Je
pensai, en apercevant, à côté de la sienne, ma large stature dans
une glace, que nous représentions des espèces d’humanité tout à
fait différentes et je souris intérieurement.
Je compris qu’il avait quelque chose à me dire et qu’il n’osait pas.
Il avait toujours été extraordinairement timide. Puis j’en impose. Il prit
plusieurs fois du tabac dans sa tabatière et il fit le geste de priser.
Mais comme il tremblait, le tabac se répandit sur sa jaquette, dont je
remarquai la vétusté.
Je savais que son modeste commerce d’éventails de papier dans
le bourg Choulia était loin d’être prospère et l’on m’avait dit
récemment qu’il faisait de mauvaises affaires.
L’idée me vint brusquement qu’il voulait m’emprunter de l’argent.
Cette idée me fut très agréable, car ma fortune était très grande, je
n’ai jamais tenu à l’argent, et ç’aurait été pour moi un véritable plaisir
d’obliger monsieur Muhcin. Je faillis taper sur son épaule fragile en
lui disant :
— Monsieur Muhcin, combien vous faut-il ? Je suis là.
Mais non, ce n’était pas cela qui l’amenait.
Monsieur Muhcin s’intéressait beaucoup à moi. Il avait appris que
j’avais eu de grands malheurs. Il voulait les connaître, les partager,
les alléger, peut-être.
Je faillis hausser les épaules. Un homme de son âge, enfermé
depuis des années dans une boutique d’éventails à bon marché
était-il susceptible de comprendre quelque chose à l’amour que
j’avais éprouvé.
Pourtant, je lui fis le récit détaillé de mon voyage à Java, de ma
rencontre avec Eva, de sa disparition, de la capture du tigre.
— Je comprends, dit-il doucement, c’est ce qui peut-être…
Et il toucha du doigt son front comme s’il faisait allusion à
quelque folie, mais je ne saisis pas le sens de ce geste.
— N’avez-vous pas entendu dire, me demanda-t-il, après un
moment de silence, qu’il y eut dans la région de Mérapi une
lamaserie de femmes ?
Je ne voyais pas quel rapport cela pouvait avoir avec mon
histoire, mais je me souvins brusquement qu’Eva m’avait, en effet,
parlé d’une lamaserie de nonnes bouddhistes qui se trouvait dans la
montagne, un peu plus loin que la lamaserie de Kobou-Dalem.
Je me souvins en même temps de l’intonation respectueuse que
sa voix avait eue, quand elle m’en avait parlé.
— Oui, répondis-je, j’ai entendu dire qu’il y avait une lamaserie
de femmes dans un endroit très sauvage de la montagne Mérapi.
— Alors, dit monsieur Muhcin vivement, ce doit être celle qui
dépend de l’abbaye de Palté dans le Thibet. Leur abbesse est
Khoutouktou et cette secte de lamas femmes rend un culte
particulier à la déesse Dorjé-Pagmo que l’on représente avec une
tête de truie.
 En prononçant le mot de Khoutouktou, monsieur Muhcin avait
baissé les yeux avec une sorte de vénération.
— Une Khoutouktou, reprit-il, est l’incarnation d’une sainte
thibétaine. Il y a en ce moment très peu de ces incarnations sur la
terre. Nous sommes dans le Kali-yuga, je veux dire l’âge de fer.
Je me mis à rire de bon cœur.
— Je ne vous cacherai pas que je n’ai aucune sympathie pour
les lamas bouddhistes. Il y a, notamment, l’un d’entre eux qui
m’inspire une vive aversion.
Je pensai à mon chapeau en paille de Manille.
— Je suis moi-même bouddhiste, dit avec douceur monsieur
Muhcin. Il y a dans les enseignements de ma religion… C’est pour
cela du reste que je suis venu vous trouver… Le but de ma visite…
Monsieur Muhcin se mit à balbutier. Il tenta de prendre une prise
qui se répandit encore. Il articula enfin :
— Il y a ceci dans les lois de Manou :
Celui qui a tué un chat, un geai bleu, une mangouste ou un
lézard doit se retirer au milieu de la forêt et se consacrer à la vie des
bêtes jusqu’à ce qu’il soit purifié.
J’avais déjà entendu cette phrase, mais je ne me rappelais ni où
ni quand. Elle me fit comprendre pourquoi le pauvre vieux Muhcin
était venu me trouver. Il voulait me faire des remontrances sur ma
manière de traiter les bêtes. J’eus pitié de lui et je l’écoutai en
silence, car il faut avoir des égards pour la vieillesse, même quand
elle radote.
On parlait de moi dans Singapour. Il avait été question d’un héron
enflammé, d’un castor privé de ses enfants d’adoption, d’un éléphant
que j’avais tué. Monsieur Muhcin avait beaucoup aimé mon père. Il
m’aimait aussi. Il me voyait avec tristesse maltraiter mes frères les
animaux.
Je me repris à rire à l’idée que je pouvais être considéré comme
le frère du tigre de Java.
 — Je ne sais pas, dis-je, quel est ce Manou dont vous me parlez,
pas plus que cette Khoutouktou du Thibet et je crois que ce n’est
pas très intéressant pour moi.
J’avais orienté, sans en avoir l’air, l’ennuyeux donneur de
semonces vers la porte de sortie.
— C’est très intéressant pour vous au contraire, me dit-il, en
levant son doigt tremblant et en baissant la voix comme s’il s’agissait
d’un secret. Je vous promets de me renseigner sur cette lamaserie
de femmes de Java. Je vous le promets. Naturellement, il faudra que
vous me promettiez de ne rien faire si…
Il n’acheva pas. Je l’écoutais à peine. Je me disais qu’il avait eu
raison de toucher son front avec le doigt, et je m’étonnai qu’il pût
avoir conscience de son radotage. Ce n’est que plus tard que ses
paroles me revinrent.
Je le regardai s’éloigner dans la rue. Il s’effaçait avec discrétion
quand il croisait quelqu’un. Il avait l’air de ne pas vouloir gêner les
passants. Comme il était petit et timide ! Je pensai à son misérable
commerce qui périclitait, à la salle basse et sans soleil, derrière sa
boutique, où il passait ses journées.
Un bouddhiste ! Quelle pitié !
 INÈS

J’avais vu pour la première fois Eva au moment où elle

descendait par une échelle. Je vis pour la première fois Inès au
moment où elle montait un escalier, le grand escalier de pierre de
l’hôtel du résident.
Elle avait une robe noire à franges d’or si extraordinairement
décolletée que je me demandai par quel miracle elle pouvait tenir
aux épaules et je pensai tout de suite à la robe de la princesse
Sekartaji.
De lourdes tresses où une rose était piquée faisaient un cadre
sombre au visage d’Inès qui exprimait une mutinerie joyeuse en
même temps qu’une autorité souveraine. Elle s’avançait avec une
aisance parfaite dans sa demi-nudité, lançant des sourires à droite
et à gauche et ayant l’air de chercher quelqu’un du regard.
Je sus par la suite qu’Inès n’avait donné rendez-vous à personne
à cette soirée du résident, mais que c’était son habitude éternelle, en
quelque lieu qu’elle fût, d’être en quête d’un Français, car les
Français réalisaient pour elle l’arbitraire idéal d’amour qu’elle s’était
formé. J’ignorais alors cette particularité.
J’avais quelquefois rencontré Inès sous les palmiers de l’avenue
royale, dans une calèche à deux chevaux blancs, et elle avait
toujours fait semblant d’ignorer mon existence.
Je savais qu’elle était Portugaise d’origine, qu’elle appartenait à
l’illustre famille des Almeida et qu’elle était veuve d’un général
anglais qui avait habité Batavia, puis Singapour. Bien que ruinée,
elle menait grand train. On disait qu’elle avait contribué à la mort de
son mari par ses folles dépenses et sa conduite irrégulière, mais j’ai
coutume de ne pas ajouter foi aux propos qui circulent sur les
femmes.
 Personne ne parlait d’elle sans ajouter avec respect : C’est une
Almeida !
J’étais accoudé sur la balustrade de pierre de l’escalier, quand
elle monta, promenant à droite et à gauche la lumière de ses yeux
noirs. Elle cherchait visiblement quelqu’un. Sait-on jamais avec les
femmes, et même avec les Almeida ? Je ne pus m’empêcher de
faire un pas en avant.
Nous nous trouvâmes nez à nez. Elle me jeta un regard glacé en
me toisant des pieds à la tête. Je sentis un formidable afflux de sang
à mon visage et je devins ridiculement cramoisi. A cet instant le
souffle d’un des grands pankas de paille qu’agitait près de nous un
nègre en uniforme fit se détacher un pétale de la rose qu’Inès avait
dans ses cheveux et ce pétale vint se poser entre mes deux yeux.
Je les fermai une seconde. Quand je les rouvris le résident
s’avançait la main tendue vers Inès qui, souriante, disparut avec lui
dans la foule.
La soirée était donnée en l’honneur de l’amiral Rowley qui se
rendait au Japon sur la Batailleuse et l’élite de Singapour y avait été
conviée. Je ne parais d’habitude dans ces sortes de fêtes que pour
m’y montrer, affirmer à tout le monde et à moi-même que je suis un
membre de l’élite élégante et riche. Je me hâte de partir dès que j’ai
été vu et que ma présence a été commentée.
Je restai ce soir-là. Je passai mon temps à suivre, de groupe en
groupe, la merveilleuse Inès. Contrairement à mon habitude, je
n’avais pas sommeil. Le sillage de la robe noire à franges d’or
possédait une vertu qui surexcitait mes nerfs.
Inès affectait de ne pas me remarquer, mais j’étais sûr qu’elle
m’avait remarqué, car parfois elle me lançait un regard où il y avait
une ironie que je ne pouvais pas m’expliquer. J’en éprouvai du dépit
et brusquement je décidai de partir. Il était très tard. Les salons de la
résidence s’étaient vidés. Les nègres du vestiaire sommeillaient.
Arrivé sur le seuil de la porte, je m’aperçus qu’il pleuvait. Ma
maison était assez éloignée et je n’avais qu’un mince habit neuf qu’il
me déplaisait de voir déformer. Je restai une ou deux minutes
immobile, écoutant le bruit que faisaient les larges gouttes de pluie
sur les feuilles des palmiers de la place.
— Tiens, il pleut, dit une voix derrière moi.
Je me retournai. J’étais à nouveau face à face avec Inès, comme
je l’avais été au commencement de la soirée quand elle montait
l’escalier de pierre. Je me sentis rougir avec la même force et je la
regardai fixement, cherchant une phrase que je ne trouvais pas et
essayant de dissimuler ma gêne par une attitude pleine de
désinvolture.
— Vous me faites rougir, en me regardant aussi fixement, dit-elle
avec bienveillance.
Elle ne rougissait pas le moins du monde et je trouvai que l’action
d’assumer ma rougeur était une preuve de grand tact.
Dans la même minute où les deux chevaux blancs de sa voiture
s’arrêtaient devant la porte, une brusque trombe d’eau s’abattit en
rafale sur la place et un souffle de tempête fit claquer, au loin, des
volets, agita des branches, me lança de la pluie à la figure. Un
Chinois en costume blanc avait bondi et tenait la portière ouverte.
— Il serait peu chrétien de ne pas vous ramener chez vous avec
ce temps, dit Inès. Suivez-moi.
Cette dernière parole fut dite comme un ordre. Avant que j’aie pu
répondre, elle avait serré un grand châle de soie neigeuse sur ses
épaules et elle s’était précipitée dans sa voiture où je la rejoignis.
Inès ne m’avait pas demandé mon adresse. Je ne pouvais douter
qu’elle ne me connût de réputation. Mais la confirmation de ma
célébrité me fut très agréable. Je ne sais quelle phrase je balbutiai
pour la remercier, mais Inès n’y attacha aucune importance et
comme son châle avait été mouillé par la pluie, elle l’ôta.
Cela contribua à brouiller mes idées.
— Je crois qu’il n’y avait pas un seul Français à la soirée du
résident, dit Inès, faisant allusion à une préoccupation constante
chez elle. Les Français voyagent si peu ! N’êtes-vous pas d’une
famille française ?
 Je lui dis que non en m’efforçant de faire l’éloge du peuple
hollandais. Mais cela ne parut pas l’intéresser. Je remarquai
rapidement qu’elle ne prêtait qu’une oreille distraite à ce que je
disais.
Tout d’un coup elle se mit à me parler d’Eva. Elle l’avait
beaucoup connue, me dit-elle, deux ans auparavant, quand les
Varoga avaient passé un hiver à Batavia.
Cette pauvre Eva qui avait un goût si passionné de la vie ! Ah !
elle n’avait pas peur de se compromettre ! Le monde est si méchant !
Mais n’y avait-il pas de la faute de son père qui fumait sans cesse et
ne s’occupait pas d’elle ? L’histoire du fils du consul américain lui
avait fait beaucoup de tort. Et aussi celle du prince Javanais que
personne n’avait ignorée. Comment monsieur Varoga avait-il été
assez naïf pour ne pas s’apercevoir que le descendant des anciens
empereurs de Java s’était déguisé en domestique par amour ?
Toutefois, on était obligé de le reconnaître, les Français
n’intéressaient pas Eva. Quelle bizarre nature avec cela ! Quelle
bizarre double nature ! Cette assoiffée de sensations, n’avait-elle pas
parlé plusieurs fois à Inès elle-même, de son désir de se convertir au
Bouddhisme ? Comment expliquer une telle dualité ?
Et Inès insista vivement pour entendre mon explication
personnelle.
Je ne pus en fournir. Je ne comprenais pas bien. Je souffrais des
souvenirs qui revenaient à ma mémoire. J’étais grisé par un parfum
délicat de femme un peu lasse et de rose fanée. Il me venait un
alanguissement, une envie de tendresse voluptueuse, et il me
semblait que les chevaux blancs nous emportaient, au claquement
de la pluie, dans une solitude de rêve.
Je répétai machinalement :
— Bouddhiste ! quelle pitié !
C’était le prince Javanais qui l’avait poussée dans cette voie.
D’ailleurs, il y avait deux lamaseries dans les environs de
l’indigoterie de Monsieur Varoga et Eva aimait à s’entretenir avec
des lamas femmes qui portent des robes rouges et doivent être
d’une extraordinaire malpropreté. Durant un temps, Eva faisait ses
confidences à Inès. Eh bien ! Eva aimait par-dessus tout le plaisir.
Elle préférait chez un homme un beau physique à une grande
intelligence. Elle l’avait souvent montré d’ailleurs !
Et là-dessus Inès eut un regard de côté qui voulait dire : vous en
savez quelque chose ! et que je trouvai déplacé. Mais j’entendais
tout, comme à travers un songe.
C’était là un problème bien curieux qu’une femme douée — ici
Inès s’arrêta et reprit après un silence en appuyant sur chaque
syllabe — d’autant de tempérament qu’Eva, pût avoir des désirs de
vie religieuse, fût une mystique et non pas une mystique chrétienne,
mais une mystique hindoue.
Il y avait longtemps qu’Eva ne pratiquait plus sa religion. Elle
avait des talismans thibétains et des sachets bénis par des saints,
habitants de l’Himalaya. Des folies, de pures folies ! Inès s’était
presque fâchée avec elle, car on peut tout faire, n’est-ce pas ? mais
il ne faut pas toucher à ce qui est sacré.
Si moi, personnellement, témoin de tout le drame, je n’avais pas
été sûr de la mort d’Eva, si je n’en avais pas eu des preuves
formelles, Inès considérait comme possible qu’elle fût, à l’heure
actuelle, volontairement enfermée dans un couvent de nonnes
bouddhistes.
Je sais combien il faut peu tenir compte des divagations des
femmes quand elles parlent les unes des autres. Inès avait dû
prendre les boutades d’Eva pour des réalités. J’avais eu assez de
conversations avec Eva et j’étais assez perspicace pour m’être
rendu compte d’un penchant religieux aussi saugrenu, s’il avait
existé dans son âme.
Le cocher avait dû faire un détour, car nous aurions dû être
arrivés devant chez moi depuis longtemps.
Avec une habileté extrême et une opportunité dans laquelle
j’excelle, j’avais pris la main d’Inès et elle ne l’avait pas retirée. La
pluie faisait des dessins mystérieux dans les carreaux. Je sentais
que nous traversions des quartiers morts. Un je ne sais quoi de
fluide et d’insaisissable faisait pressentir la venue prochaine de
l’aurore. Je respirais l’haleine tiède d’Inès et son amour de la vie se
communiquait à moi par la main que je serrais. Elle avait cessé de
parler et il me sembla qu’elle allait défaillir.
Tout d’un coup, elle dit :
— Nous sommes arrivés.
La voiture s’était arrêtée. Je vis la grille d’un jardin, une villa
inconnue.
Légère, Inès sauta de la voiture et fit en courant les quelques pas
qui la séparaient de la porte d’entrée.
Je faillis dire : Ce n’est pas là ma maison !
Mais je m’arrêtai.
Ma préoccupation dominante était de me conduire en galant
homme et de ne pas me livrer à quelque grossière tentative. La nuit
du temple de Ganésa m’avait donné une terrible leçon.
— Eh bien ! venez ! dit la voix d’Inès avec une nuance
d’impatience.
Je la rejoignis. Nous étions dans une pièce dont le plancher était
recouvert de nattes et de coussins et qu’éclairait, d’une manière
confuse, une lampe à huile. Des laques luisaient sur les murs. Un
grand parasol orange et vert était suspendu au plafond.
J’entendis du dehors la voiture qui s’éloignait.
— Je rentrerai à pied, en me promenant, dis-je, dès que la pluie
sera un peu calmée.
Je pensais montrer de la délicatesse par ces paroles. Inès
referma brusquement la porte puis, avec lenteur, elle ôta son châle
qu’elle avait remis pour regagner la villa.
— Mon châle est tout mouillé, dit-elle.
Elle fit deux ou trois pas et je remarquai qu’elle avait quelque
chose de félin dans le mouvement des épaules qui la faisait
ressembler à une panthère.
Elle revint vers moi, en souriant un peu ironiquement.
 — Avez-vous une cigarette ? dit-elle.
Je cherchai fébrilement mon étui.
— Voilà du feu, et elle fit craquer une allumette qu’elle me tendit.
Elle était tout près de moi et il me sembla qu’elle m’offrait aussi
ses lèvres.
Je soufflai l’allumette. J’allais prendre Inès dans mes bras, mais
au moment où la palpitation de la flamme s’éteignit, je vis un homme
à gros ventre et à tête d’éléphant qui me regardait. Je sentais que
les lèvres d’Inès étaient humides et chaudes. Mais je me refusai à y
penser.
Nous fumâmes en silence.
Par un de ces brusques caprices qui lui sont familiers, la pluie
s’arrêta tout à coup.
— Je vais rentrer en me promenant, tout doucement, dis-je
encore.
Une légère lumière blafarde teintait les choses au dehors. Je vis
dans le jardin de grands champakas rouges que l’eau alourdissait et
faisait pencher. Inès m’accompagna jusqu’à la grille en marchant sur
la pointe des pieds pour ne pas mouiller ses petits souliers.
Je la saisis brusquement et elle se laissa aller contre moi sans
résister. J’eus, durant une seconde, sa bouche mouvante sous la
mienne. Mais des voix retentirent. Un groupe de coolies s’avançait
avec une lanterne.
Nous nous séparâmes et je portai la main d’Inès à mes lèvres.
— Et moi qui vous demandais si vous étiez Français, dit-elle en
riant, au moment où je m’éloignais. Ah ! non, vous ne l’êtes pas du
tout.
 LE CHAPEAU DE PAILLE

J’arrive à l’événement le plus important de ma vie qui fut une

mauvaise action, accomplie consciemment.
Je ne raconterai pas en détail comment je fus amené à épouser
Inès, quels détours singuliers elle prit pour arriver à ce résultat, le
chiffre énorme de ses dettes que je payai et la certitude que j’acquis
de son absence totale d’amour pour moi. Tout cela est de peu
d’importance. Les événements les plus considérables de l’existence
ne sont ni les morts, ni les mariages, ni les catastrophes qui
surviennent, mais certains petits faits qui ont, sur l’évolution de
l’esprit, une influence secrète.
Le lendemain du jour de mon mariage coïncidait avec je ne sais
plus quelle fête chinoise que l’on célébrait non seulement dans le
campong chinois, mais encore dans les quartiers arabes et hindous.
J’avais l’habitude, dans ces occasions, d’obéir aux usages
pratiqués par mon père. J’ouvrais le rez-de-chaussée de ma maison
et les portes de mon jardin et la foule venait, toute la journée,
admirer mes collections et mes animaux.
Je m’étais accoudé, vers le milieu de l’après-midi, à une fenêtre
du premier étage et je regardais distraitement les Cinghalais à figure
efféminée, les Hindous de bronze aux cheveux flottants, les femmes
Malabares au nez orné de pendeloques, aux doigts de pieds garnis
d’anneaux d’argent, les Chinois familiaux en lustrine noire avec des
cortèges d’enfants. Tous défilaient devant les cages, sous la
surveillance de mes gardiens et de quelques policemen sikhs en
uniforme blanc et en turban rouge envoyés par le résident, et
j’entendais avec satisfaction leurs cris admiratifs et leur murmure
d’effroi quand ils contemplaient le tigre de Java, à l’œil unique.
 Inès qui était dans une pièce voisine entra tout d’un coup dans
celle où je me trouvais. Elle tenait une lettre à la main et elle me dit
en souriant, négligemment et sans me regarder :
— J’ai oublié de vous dire que j’avais reçu il y a quelques jours,
une lettre d’une de mes amies de Java.
Elle avait sur son visage la même expression de satisfaction
amère qu’elle avait eue, plusieurs fois, pendant nos fiançailles, pour
me dire des choses désagréables, telles que des indications de
sommes très élevées à payer ou des récits de rencontres de
Français très séduisants.
Je pris la lettre et je la parcourus. Elle ne contenait rien
d’intéressant pour moi. Elle donnait des nouvelles de beaucoup de
personnes de la société de Batavia qui m’étaient inconnues, elle
semblait n’être que la suite d’une lettre précédente.
J’allais la rendre à Inès lorsque je lus le post-scriptum.
Nous ne savons rien de plus au sujet de la belle amie du prince,
de la soi-disant fiancée du dompteur. Son père, paraît-il, fume de
plus en plus et est difficilement visible. Quelqu’un de tout à fait digne
de foi qui est allé le voir prétend lui avoir entendu dire à quelqu’un
avec qui il avait une conversation très animée : Ma fille est
désormais morte pour moi.
Je laissai tomber la lettre. Inès remuait des objets dans la pièce
et me surveillait du coin de l’œil.
Si le père d’Eva avait déclaré que sa fille était morte pour lui, cela
n’impliquait-il pas qu’elle était vivante pour les autres ?
Juste en cet instant, mon regard que je promenais au hasard
dans le jardin, parmi la foule bigarrée, fut frappé par la silhouette
d’un Européen mal vêtu. Il glissait modestement le long des cages et
il s’arrêta devant le tigre de Java. Je remarquai son pantalon
ridiculement étroit et court, sa chemise en coton bon marché, et son
absence de cravate. Mais je remarquai surtout son chapeau, un
superbe chapeau en paille de Manille, à larges bords souples, un
chapeau que je connaissais, mon chapeau.
 L’homme que je voyais, qui se trouvait chez moi, était le
charmeur de lézards d’une fumerie sur la bosse du chameau, le
prétendu lama voyageur, le prêtre d’un culte grotesque où l’on
adorait Ganésa, le personnage qui m’avait été si spontanément
antipathique et que je soupçonnais de m’avoir dénigré auprès de
Monsieur Varoga et peut-être d’Eva. Et il portait mon chapeau !
Je me dressai. Je descendis en courant l’escalier, je m’élançai
dans le jardin.
Au bruit que je fis il se retourna. Je vis ses grands yeux clairs, la
calme expression de son visage, son aisance parfaite sous ses
vêtements ridicules. Il me sembla même qu’il fit un pas vers moi
avec ce mouvement que l’on a lorsqu’on aperçoit quelqu’un à qui
l’on a quelque chose à dire.
Mais déjà, je l’avais saisi par le col de sa chemise sans cravate.
J’agissais au hasard, sans plan préconçu, poussé par cette chaleur
de la colère, cette force mystérieuse de la haine qui supprime toute
réflexion.
— Vous m’avez volé le chapeau que vous portez ! criai-je avec
une sincérité que je puisais dans la profonde ignominie de mon
mensonge.
Malabars Cinghalais, Chinois, Bouguis, firent un cercle amusé et
tout de suite injurieux pour le porteur du chapeau qui, secoué par ma
main vigoureuse paraissait de beaucoup le plus faible de nous deux.
Tous mes employés étaient accourus, mais ma supériorité
physique était tellement éclatante qu’ils ne songeaient pas à me
prêter main forte. Je relâchai un peu mon étreinte.
L’homme ne résistait pas. Je surpris sur ses traits cette
expression de répulsion et de surprise attristée que peut avoir la
parfaite pureté en contact soudain avec la mauvaise foi cynique, la
brutalité, la plus atroce laideur de la vie.
Cela ne fit qu’augmenter ma colère.
La police anglaise est très bien faite. Plus encore que toutes les
polices du monde, elle donne immédiatement raison, si deux
hommes ont un différend, au mieux vêtu, à celui qui appartient à la
classe sociale la plus élevée.
Les policemen qui intervinrent ne demandèrent aucune
explication. Ils se jetèrent sur l’homme accusé de vol, comme sur un
voleur professionnel, et ils entraînèrent avec brutalité cette créature
inoffensive que je venais de jeter dans le cercle du mal et qui ne
faisait aucun geste pour protester.
La justice n’avait pas encore subi à Singapour le contrecoup de
la réorganisation de la justice des Indes. Elle était rapide et dure aux
pauvres, comme toutes les justices qui ont plus souci d’ordre que de
justice.
En matière de vol flagrant ou d’attaque à main armée, un juge
anglais se prononçait sans appel, et il n’y avait pas d’inutile
procédure et de bavardage d’avocat. Le juge était seulement assisté
d’un conseiller indigène, Hindou, Chinois ou Malais, chargé de
l’éclairer sur les usages et coutumes de ces peuples et qui servait en
même temps d’interprète.
Je fus appelé au tribunal le lendemain. J’avais été tellement
approuvé par tout le monde pour avoir fait arrêter un voleur que
j’avais fini par me persuader que j’accomplissais une action louable
et que je m’y rendis avec une conscience tranquille.
Le tribunal était un vieux monument à colonnes datant de la
fondation de Singapour et la justice s’y rendait du haut d’une petite
estrade où siégeait le juge, dans une salle aux murs nus, construite
en blocs cyclopéens et dont l’immensité de pierre devait
impressionner les indigènes. Il y avait devant la porte un poste de
cipayes dont le sergent me salua militairement quand je passai.
Tout se passa très rapidement et du commencement à la fin mon
amour-propre fut caressé par les signes extérieurs de considération
que chacun manifesta pour ma personne.
Outre le salut du sergent des cipayes, je note l’obséquiosité du
chapelier anglais qui m’avait vendu le chapeau de paille et que
j’avais fait citer comme témoin, le mouvement de curiosité qui passa
parmi les assistants quand je parus et la légère inclinaison de tête
du juge qui voulait dire : Je suis un juge impartial. Je ne donne ni
approbation ni désapprobation à ceux qui comparaissent devant
moi, mais je vois d’un coup d’œil à quelle personnalité j’ai affaire.
Ce juge était un vieillard gras et rasé avec des yeux tout petits et
très brillants.
L’homme au chapeau sortit brusquement entre deux policemen
sikhs d’une porte basse qui était derrière l’estrade du juge. Il était
nu-tête et il avait des menottes. Il avait les traits tirés de quelqu’un
qui a mal dormi, mais son visage avait un calme extraordinaire qui
pouvait très bien passer pour le cynisme d’un voleur habitué aux
vols, aux arrestations qui suivent les vols, aux condamnations qui
suivent les arrestations.
J’évitai de fixer ses yeux. Je les rencontrai pourtant une seconde
et je vis, à ma grande surprise qu’ils étaient plus clairs encore que la
veille, mais dépouillés de leur étonnement douloureux et entièrement
exempts de reproche. Cela me fut insupportable et mon irritation
augmenta, quand je m’aperçus en répondant à une question
insignifiante d’un assistant, que ma voix était mal assurée.
Le conseiller indigène tempère d’ordinaire la sévérité du juge, il
plaide la cause de l’accusé. Mais on ne put dans ce cas faire appel à
aucun des conseillers, l’accusé s’étant déclaré Thibétain et parlant
parfaitement l’anglais.
Dès le début, la cause sembla entendue d’avance.
Le greffier me demanda mes noms et qualités avec une nuance
de la voix qui voulait dire : ceci est une pure formalité, nous les
connaissons bien !
Quelques rires partirent de la foule quand le Thibétain questionné
sur son nom et son lieu d’origine, répondit qu’il s’appelait Djohal et
qu’il appartenait à une lamaserie située dans l’Himalaya en un
endroit qui n’était mentionné sur aucune carte. Un vieillard du
faubourg Choulia chez lequel il habitait à Singapour était son seul
répondant.
Ce vieillard était convoqué. On l’appela. Un cri grêle retentit dans
l’assistance et un très vieil Hindou, vêtu de haillons s’avança en
tremblant. Il était d’une extraordinaire timidité et il ne parlait que
l’Hindoustani et encore un dialecte du nord que personne ne
comprit. Soudain, impressionné par la majesté du tribunal il se mit à
pleurer.
Le juge le pria avec impatience de se retirer.
Il y eut de nouveaux rires quand l’accusé répondant à une
question du juge, déclara qu’il avait trouvé mon chapeau flottant
dans une rivière de Java et qu’il l’avait pêché avec son bâton. Il avait
pensé qu’il n’y avait aucun mal à mettre sur sa tête un chapeau
errant au fil de l’eau. Il sentait l’invraisemblance de cette explication,
mais il était obligé de la donner parce qu’elle était vraie.
La douceur avec laquelle il s’exprimait sembla à tous de
l’hypocrisie. Il y avait dans la lassitude de ses épaules le sentiment
que toute lutte était inutile, qu’il était pris dans le piège de la
méchanceté des hommes et qu’il ne pourrait s’en échapper.
Le juge haussa les épaules. Il savait à quoi s’en tenir. Il me
demanda de prêter serment. Je lus dans ses petits yeux, sa face
large et plissée : Simple formalité ! Je vous connais comme un
parfait gentleman d’une honorabilité renommée.
Il m’était impossible de revenir en arrière, bien qu’à cette minute
je l’eusse voulu de tout mon cœur.
J’étendis la main. Mais je ne reconnus pas le son de ma voix
sans timbre. Et tout à coup j’éprouvai cette sensation de vide autour
de moi qu’il ne m’était arrivé de ressentir que lorsque j’étais en
danger de mort.
Je me trouvai seul dans un espace illimité, un abîme profond du
fond duquel je faisais monter, d’une voix blanche, le faux serment, le
témoignage éternel de l’injustice du fort contre le faible. Autour de
moi il y avait de hautes murailles de pierre, non pas celles du
tribunal mais des déroulements de pics, tous les Himalayas avec
leurs neiges inviolées, leurs lamaseries secrètes, leurs mystères
légendaires. L’homme au chapeau était au loin sur une hauteur avec
un visage serein, rigoureusement exempt de mal. Et derrière lui, à
travers lui, dans un panorama vertigineux se déroulaient tous les