In Katherine Baskin’s Follow, Then, To Where You See, a principled academic, frustrated by the failures of her administration, acts alone to expose a professor with a malignant reputation. The protagonist, an otherwise mild-mannered history adjunct known only as XX, addresses rumors of the professor’s harassment of and affairs with students by first projecting incendiary slogans on the sides of campus buildings and then hiring “crisis actors” (XX’s own ironic designation) to reenact the alleged transgressions. With its piercing appraisal of contemporary academia, Follow, Then, To Where You See blurs distinctions between art and activism. Baskin, like Carmela Camarillo before her, uses what appear to be factual documents, though she does enough undermining of their authenticity to keep her book firmly in the world of fiction. This proves to be a canny strategy; as the book moves past its opening gambit into a deeper and more painful examination of how accusations are adjudicated, it becomes a self-aware critique of the ways in which information is evaluated and deployed. For decades to come, Baskin’s book will be hailed as a landmark in the exploration of identity politics, memory, and personal responsibility—not to mention the potentially explosive interaction among them.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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