[Happy Banned Books Week! In high school I had
a deeply nerdy sweatshirt
that read “Celebrate Freedom: Read a Banned Book”; this week I’ll do so by
AmericanStudying books that have been frequently banned, in the past or
recently. And yeah, read a Banned Book this week!]
When banning
becomes censorship, and the best ways to respond to the latter.
The examples of
both banning and challenging that I’ve discussed in my posts so far (and those
I’ll discuss in the remaining couple of posts in the series) have generally
involved classrooms, schools, and/or libraries. Since those are among the most
common places where we as a society encounter books, of course, the questions of
what to read (or not read) there or what to include (or not include) in a
collection are certainly vital ones, with significant consequences for whether
and how readers (young and old alike) encounter a particular book and author. That’s
particularly true for readers who can’t afford or aren’t as likely to buy a
book, since schools and libraries offer the only consistently available free
alternatives to such purchases. But I think it’s nonetheless important to
distinguish between those forms of banning and challenging, frustrating and
destructive as they might be, and what we would call censorship, since those forms
don’t involve either stopping a work from being published or keeping it out of
the hands of readers entirely.
Those latter
forms of more aggressive censorship are significantly rarer, but the word certainly
seems to apply to how a number of Islamic and Arabic societies
and nations responded to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The
Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie’s acclaimed
and controversial novel, which combined biographical and historical details
surrounding the life of Muhammad with magical realism and satire, was outright banned
from sales in many of those nations, as well as
in India (where it was defined as hate speech toward a religious group). The
attacks on the novel and its author famously and horrifically went far further
still, with Iranian leader Ayatollah
Khomeini issuing a call for Rushdie’s death that led to
multiple assassination attempts and, tragically, the murder of the novel’s Japanese
translator Hitoshi Igarashi (among other violent incidents). Yet even if
those extreme and awful events had not transpired, the bans on the novel’s publication
and sales in these societies would certainly constitute censorship at its
worst, the denial of the book to millions (or perhaps, in India’s case,
billions) of potential readers and communities.
Obviously the
most straightforward way to resist such censorship is to work to challenge and reverse
the bans, which as far as I can tell remain in place in many of those nations (including
India). On a more individual level, both reading and (when one can)
purchasing such censored books is an important way not just to challenge the
concept of censorship, but also to support the author (whether financially or
otherwise). But I would also argue—perhaps obviously, but also genuinely—that
engagements with the histories and stories of banned books, such as those I’m
offering in this week’s series, comprise another important way to resist literary
censorship in all its forms. As is so often the case, the more we engage these histories
and stories, the clearer it becomes that they have been consistently wrong—not just
in moral or ethical terms (although yes), but also in their fundamental
misreadings of texts and misunderstandings of their effects on audiences. Indeed,
the history of literary censorship—as illustrated most potently by
Nazi Germany’s book burnings—reveals that it is precisely such censorship,
not books, which has the potential to destroy societies.
Next banned book
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Banned books you’d highlight?
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