Posts Tagged ‘banned books’
“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path”*…
The attack on libraries, in the U.S. and beyond, has been a recurring theme here– precisely because it is so threatening. The estimable Richard Ovenden considers the titles banned, the data deleted, the nation’s librarians sacked without explanation, and explains that Donald Trump’s war on books is a threat to democracy across the world…
I am a librarian. I am fortunate enough to run one of the world’s largest and best known libraries – the Bodleian in Oxford – but my experience of libraries began as a reader. My mother took me as a child to the Deal public library in Kent, and it was there, in its modest book-filled rooms, that I discovered new worlds. My life was transformed by a public library (and its librarians) that allowed me to read freely from its well-stocked shelves. Throughout my career, I have seen at first-hand how libraries underpin the education and self-improvement of all of our citizens, rich and poor, young and old, of all creeds and colours, through providing access to a multitude of ideas and knowledge.
They celebrate the history and identity of our communities; they are stout defenders of facts and truth in an age of misinformation; and they are places where people can learn about their rights and how to protect them. This year we celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which created our system of free public libraries – a kind of “NHS for the mind”. But what has been happening to American libraries rings a loud alarm bell for our own cherished library system.
Libraries large and small in the US are now on the frontline of the battles over knowledge that have intensified since the second presidency of Donald Trump began. The attack on libraries and librarians there is shocking and happening at a disorienting pace. Thousands of books have been banned from public and school libraries, librarians have received death threats and many have been fired. The heads of both the National Archives and the Library of Congress have been sacked on spurious grounds. Data has been deleted and funding for critical initiatives ceased.
Why is the US, the land of the free, where the realm of ideas and knowledge has been enabled by the first amendment, now turning on institutions that have been among the most trusted in society?
The first dispatches from the war on libraries began to reach me in 2022. I had recently published Burning the Books, which highlighted the role of libraries in society through a long history of attacks on the written word. Librarians began to send me messages and tagged me on social media, sharing news of assaults on public and school libraries in Florida and Texas. As one librarian put it, my book was fast beginning to look as if it would need updating. A pattern was forming: an epidemic of book banning, driven by groups from the far right of the political spectrum, empowered through social media, and funded, it seemed, by larger and darker organisations.
Throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, a coalition of extremist groups, with interests ranging from Christian nationalism to white supremacy, and anti-gay protesters were able to mobilise around common themes such as opposing sex education, LGBTQ+ issues and race equality. They began a concerted campaign to control what young people could read. Two tactics were deployed. The first was to seize control of the boards that oversee small public and school libraries. The boards then censored the books available to library users, especially young people. The second was the mobilisation of supporters using social media, manufacturing outrage through spreading lies, and encouraging challenges to libraries and attacks on librarians.
These tactics have been highly successful. The American Library Association (ALA) collects data on book bans in US libraries. Between 2001 and 2020 an average of 273 unique titles were challenged each year. In 2023, 9,021 individual titles were challenged across hundreds of libraries…
[Richard elaborates on those attacks…]
… Trump’s second presidency has heralded a more ferocious phase in the book-banning wars, moving these acts of local censorship to state and federal level. In April, I received an email letting me know that the Rutherford County’s board of education in Tennessee ordered 145 books to be removed from circulation, citing their “sexually explicit” content; they included Beloved by Toni Morrison and Forever by Judy Blume. In May, a judge ruled that users of Llano County library in Texas have no first amendment right to receive information in the form of books held by public libraries, and that the choice of books a library holds is a form of allowable “government speech” immune from constitutional scrutiny. At a stroke, in Trump’s US, public libraries are the mouthpiece of central government…
… The great civic public libraries, such as those in New York, Brooklyn, San Diego, Boston and Los Angeles, have not sat idly by as the smaller libraries drew the fire. They have digitised banned books to make them available freely online and they have helped develop toolkits to support libraries facing book banning. Despite these efforts, Friedman’s assessment of the future of the free circulation of ideas in the US is sobering: “Between Llano County and Mahmoud v Taylor, we are now seeing a radical upheaval in the legal frameworks for freedom to read,” he explained. It is hard to believe, but in Tennessee, the works of Bill Watterson, the cartoonist author of Calvin and Hobbes, are now considered a danger to young people and are banned in school libraries in many counties…
[Richard unpacks the assault on the Library of Congrees and teh national Archive, and explores the ways on which this particularly heinous form of censorship is being “exported” to other countries…]
… On 10 May 1933, in the heart of Berlin, a mass book-burning was held, where texts considered to be “un-German” – including, of course, Jewish texts, but also books from a library of human sexuality on LGBTQ+ themes – were burned on a pyre on the Unter den Linden boulevard. It is tempting to draw the analogy between this event and the mass burning of books across the US right now.
But if we do we should also remember that new libraries were founded, such as the German Freedom Library in Paris, to counteract Nazi censorship. “You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe,” Helen Keller wrote in 1933, “but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on.”
We should, in this anniversary year, not only defend the bold and ambitious idea of the Victorian age – that society would benefit from its citizens having access to a free library – but ensure that all people can read freely. To do so, we must empower, support and celebrate the role of libraries and librarians as defenders of an open, pluralist society – the hidden but essential infrastructure of democracy itself…
Eminently worth reading in full: “There is no political power without power over the archive,” from @richove.bsky.social in @theobserveruk.bsky.social.
We might note that, while the primary energy behind this threat is political, it is being supported by the same folks who are hollowing out journalism in the U.S. and capitalizing on the rush to incarcerate immigrants— private equity, which is supporting book banners and local defunding of libraries, then angling to take over the public libraries that they denude.
Your correspondent supports libraries and archives like Richard’s (Oxford’s Bodleian Library), the Harvard Libraries, The New York Public Library, my own local San Francisco Public Library, and the remarkable Internet Archive. You might consider contributing to your local library and to the other libraries and archives of your choice.
* Carl Sagan
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As we opt for open, we might recall that on this date in 1951 J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was published by Little, Brown and Co. Almost immediately, it was the subject of bans. From 1961 to 1982 it was the most challenged book in the U.S. There was a resurgence of challenges in 2005 and 2009… and it is again the subject of broad removal efforts. In spite of (or more probably, because of) this, it keeps finding its way into adolescent hands, often as assigned reading by high school English teachers.
“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do”*…
And ’twas ever thus. Erin Maglaque explains how Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory…
In the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this problem. As Dante put it, angels “make themselves…completely known to each other,” communicating directly from divine spirit to divine spirit: a kind of transcendental laser beamed between celestial heads. But humans misunderstand; we grope for meaning; we struggle to be understood. From the beginning of the Catholic Church as an institution, churchmen sought to control the power of words—to shape good readers and eliminate bad ones. This meant censorship.
The Roman Index of Prohibited Books was first published in 1559. Catholic censorship persisted another four hundred years, making the Index the “longest-lived, and least understood” mechanism of censorship in history, as Robin Vose writes in a new book on the subject. At first, Catholic censorship was a relatively straightforward matter: all Protestant books, and all Protestant authors, were banned. So were books printed anonymously or without specifying a printer, date, or place of publication: these were too suspicious. It didn’t actually matter what books said; there were already too many for the Roman censors and theologians even to skim them all. By the end of the sixteenth century censors were simply copying titles from the Frankfurt Book Fair catalog into the Index. Soon, most regions—and many individual cities—had created their own indexes of prohibited books. They each had their own local persecutory flavor: in Spain, for example, the inquisitor general banned Islamic and Jewish writings, especially the Talmud. Local inquisitors in Mexico City banned books that inquisitors in Madrid found permissible.
The 1559 Index was a pet project of a conservative pope. Paul IV is maybe best known to history as the pope who had the Jews of Rome enclosed in a ghetto and gave freer rein to the persecutory impulses of the Roman Inquisition; he was hated by ordinary Romans of his own day, who burned the Inquisition office at his death. But the Index was also the culmination of pressures both inside and outside the Catholic Church, some of which had been mounting for centuries. The flourishing of heretical sects in medieval Southern Europe, such as the Cathars, and the Inquisition tribunals that arose to persecute them; the Reformation, and especially Luther’s mastery of the new technology of the printing press; the reforming voices inside the Catholic Church who sought theological uniformity and consistency: each contributed to the development of a universal Index for Catholic Europe. Soon the censors had an office in which to process great volumes of paperwork. The Congregation of the Index—a department of the Curia—was established in 1571; it worked closely with the Roman Inquisition and the Master of the Sacred Palace, the pope’s chief theologian. Everyone in Rome took a professional interest in heretical ideas.
…
Censors concerned themselves with all genres of reimagining the world, from science and political ballads to vernacular literature. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One (1771) tells of a Parisian who wakes up in a future society ruled by a philosopher-king, with no priests or monks, no slavery, no pastry chefs, no dance teachers, and no tobacco. (There is no accounting for utopian tastes.) It was, of course, included on the Index; Charles III of Spain was said to have burned a copy with his own hands. Other such fantasies, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)to Tommaso Campanella’s Città del sole (written in 1602 and printed in 1623)—which imagined a city whose walls were painted with all of human knowledge in images that “render learning easy” to its citizens—were banned too.
The promise of learning without mediation was as utopian as free love.
…
In Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (2020), Hannah Marcus found that censorship in fact “catalyzed” new conversations about medicine. By asking experts to weigh in on the content of potentially heretical medical knowledge, the church effectively convened a kind of learned society for medical discussion and debate. Similarly, elite scholars were not only censored by the church but used as experts to determine whether to ban a book or how to expurgate it—that is, how to eliminate troubling passages so that the book could circulate in revised form.
Yet censorship worked as intended for the relatively impoverished and unlearned… While doctors, scientists, and aristocratic scholars could petition the Congregation of the Index to hold banned books in their private libraries, ordinary men and women in Catholic Europe had no such recourse. Some banned topics—such as forms of occult magic like divination, astrology, and hermeticism—were especially popular among elite scholars, yet laypeople couldn’t use scriptural amulets or charms for medical cures or good fortune. The Bible was translated by Catholic scholars into Polish, German, Hungarian, and Arabic, for use in conversion. But ordinary Italians were not authorized by the church to read a Bible in their own language until 1757.
…
As I scrolled through scans of printed Indexes, nearly all of which are available online, I wondered about all those authors and titles, many of which would have been lost to history if they had not been included on the Index. Possibilities of alternative worlds, alternative futures, flicker from the thousands of pages of banned books and authors and subjects: magic, flashing weapons in forbidden duels, female authors whose names are otherwise unattested, the colonization of the moon, utopian ideas, love letters, escapist romance, erotic tales, madrigals. The Indexes are a counter-archive of European history.
More difficult to account for is the toll of self-censorship: the art and literature that was never made, the religious and scientific ideas that remained unwritten—unthought, even—because of the existence of the Index, the congregation, and the Inquisition tribunal. This counterfactual European history is a history of the obscure, the impracticable, the unrecorded. It is so elusive as to remain nearly unimaginable. But for every erotic novella or psalm-inscribed jewel on the Index, a crack appears in the edifice of our historical imagination. Some light gets in. The censor is crowded out by the apparition of what might have been.
In 1574 inquisitors came to the door of Domenico, a cobbler in Spilimbergo, in the far northeast of Italy. They seized and destroyed the only three books that Domenico owned: Orlando Furioso, the Decameron, and the New Testament. Domenico responded: “I swear I shall never read again.” This was the tragedy of censorship, an unbearable narrowing of the spiritual and cultural lives of ordinary people. But I also hear in Domenico’s words his own intolerance: an intolerance of suppression, a disobedience of power. Domenico would not be told how to read. He would rather not read at all…
Too timely: “Unwanted Thoughts,” from @ErinMaglaque in @nybooks.
* Italo Calvino
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As we listen for the rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 325 that Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, convened the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (now Iznik) to discuss Arianism, a heresy arguing that Christ was subordinate to God the Father. “I entreat you,” Constantine said at the opening of the Council of Nicea, “to remove the causes of dissension among you and to establish peace.” The council attempted to resolve the bitter conflict by anathematizing Arius (Arianism’s founder) and ordering the burning of all his books. Still, the conflict raged for decades.
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself”*…
Jodi Picoult‘s books are being pulled off of Florida school library shelves; she explains why we should care…
In the past six months, my books have been banned dozens of times in dozens of school districts. As sad as it seems, I was getting used to the emails from PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman telling me that yet again, my novel was under attack. But this week, something truly egregious happened. In Martin Country School District, 92 books were pulled from the school library shelves. Twenty of them were mine.
The 92 books fell into three categories: those with mature content, those written by BIPOC authors, and those written by LGBTQ authors. My books were removed because they were, according to the sole parent who made the challenge, “adult romance that should not be on school shelves.” It is worth noting I do not write adult romance. The majority of the books that were targeted do not even have a kiss in them. What they do have, however, are issues like racism, abortion rights, gun control, gay rights, and other topics that encourage kids to think for themselves.
When I read through the list of the 20 novels of mine that were pulled from the Martin County School District bookshelves, one surprised me the most. The Storyteller is a novel about the Holocaust. It chronicles the growth of anti-Semitism and fascism in Nazi Germany. There was a strange irony that a parent wanted this particular book removed, because it felt a bit like history repeating itself…
Florida has passed very broadly worded laws that limit what books can and cannot be in schools. Teachers who do not obey face penalties. Every book in a school must be reviewed by a media specialist and schools are told to “err on the side of caution.”
Some activists and parents have taken these laws as free reign to remove whatever books they personally do not deem acceptable. Some districts take the books off shelves “pending review”— but months and years go by without a review, and the books remain locked away. The outcome has been empty shelves in Florida classrooms and school libraries, where teachers and media specialists don’t only ban books that have been challenged but, in fear of future retribution, also remove other books that might result in punitive measures. The result? Students don’t have access to certain titles.
…
Many of my writer friends whose books have been challenged hear the same refrain: “Kids can just get those books somewhere else!” Unfortunately, not every kid has access to a public library or transportation to get there; for many, a school or classroom library is their only resource. We also hear: “Oh, that’s just gonna drive up sales!” Trust me, none of us want that. What we want is for kids to be able to read what they want to read, instead of being told what they should read. We want the great majority of folks in communities who support the freedom to read to be just as loud as those select few who are making so much noise against it.
In the brilliant words of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, books create windows through which kids can escape and mirrors in which they can find themselves. We want you to stand in solidarity with us, the writers who create these books. Because we’ve seen, historically, what the next chapter looks like when we don’t speak out against book challenges… and that story does not end well…
Eminently worth reading in full: “What Florida Doesn’t Want You to Know About Its Book Bans,” from @jodipicoult in @thedailybeast.
* Potter Stewart (Supreme Court Justice, 1958-81)
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As we encourage curiosity, we might spare a thought for a man with some personal experience of censorship, Jan Němec; he died on this date in 2016. A filmmaker, he was the the “enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave.”
His best known work is A Report on the Party and the Guests (1966), about a group of friends on a picnic who are invited to a bizarre banquet by a charismatic sadist, who eventually bullies most of them into blind conformity and brutality while those who resist are hunted down. It was not a hit with Czech authorities, who had it banned. (Antonín Novotný, the president, was said to “climb the walls” on viewing it and Němec’s arrest for subversion was considered.)
He was in the middle of shooting a documentary about the Prague Spring for a US producer when the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred. He smuggled his footage of invasion to Vienna, where it was broadcast on Austrian television. He re-edited the footage released the documentary Oratorio for Prague. It received standing ovations at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1968. Němec’s footage would eventually be used by countless international news organizations as stock footage of the invasion; and Philip Kaufman’s film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) also used footage from the film (on which Němec served as an advisor).
Němec was given a warning by the government that “… if he came back, they would find some legal excuse to throw him in jail.” From 1974 to 1989, he lived in Germany, Paris, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. He stayed in the U.S. for twelve years. Unable to work in traditional cinema, he was a pioneer in using video cameras to record weddings (documenting, for example, the nuptials of the Swedish royal family).
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, he returned to his native country, where he made several films, including Code Name Ruby (1997) and Late Night Talks with Mother (2000), which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno.
“Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument”*…
Through reading, champion debater Bo Sen learned that disagreement can be a source of good, not ill, even in our polarized age.
Nowadays, disagreement is out of fashion. It is seen as the root of our personal and political troubles. Debate, in making a sport out of argument, seems at once a trivial pursuit and a serious impediment to the kinds of conversation we want to cultivate. But in my first book, Good Arguments, I propose that the opposite is true. Students may train to win every disagreement, but they soon learn that this is impossible. Even the best lose most of the competitions they attend. What one can do is disagree better—be more convincing and tenacious, and argue in a manner that keeps others willing to come back for another round. In the end, the prize for all that training and effort is a good conversation…
He shares several recommendations, e.g…
Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry
Scarry, one of my English professors at Harvard, is the rare scholar who can change how you move through the world. She has made a career of bringing language to the ineffable ends of human experience: pain and beauty. In Thinking in an Emergency, she places deliberation at the core of a democratic response to emergencies including natural disasters and nuclear war. Scarry argues that debate, both real-time and prospective, need not hinder action and can instead secure the resolve and coordination needed for rapid response. She warns against leaders who invoke catastrophes to demand that their populations stop thinking. In this era of calamities, natural and man-made, Scarry’s wisdom is essential: “Whatever happens, keep talking.”
…
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Malcolm X learned to debate as a 20-something in what was then called Norfolk Prison Colony, a state prison founded on reformist ideals that fielded debate teams against local colleges such as Boston University. In his memoir, X describes the experience of finding one’s voice and communing with an audience as a revelation: “I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been … once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” For most people, debate is a pastime of school and university years. This memoir shows that one can make a career and a life from its lessons in fierce, courageous, and resolute disagreement.
…
When Should Law Forgive?, by Martha Minow
One question I struggle with in Good Arguments is when we should stop debating. Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School, provides here a model of humane consideration on the limits of the adversarial ethic. Hers is an argument for accommodating forgiveness—the “letting go of justified grievances”—in the legal system. She builds the book as one would a spacious house, each area of the law—juvenile justice, debt, amnesties and pardons—a separate chapter in which readers are invited to stay and reflect awhile. Martha Nussbaum is illuminating on related topics in her critique of anger in Anger and Forgiveness, which elicited rebuttal from Myisha Cherry in The Case for Rage, an argument for the emotion’s usefulness in conditions of resistance. The need to balance dispute and conciliation, accountability and grace, cannot be transcended, only better managed.
Seven more recommendations at “The Books That Taught a Debate Champion How to Argue,” from @helloboseo in @TheAtlantic.
* Desmond Tutu
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As we put the civil back into civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the Roman Catholic Church announced, via a notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“index of prohibited books”), which was originally instituted in 1557. The communique stated that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties. So… read on.
“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often”*…
Interior of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, by David Loggan, 1675. Rijksmuseum.
In the nineteenth century some librarians became preoccupied with the morality or lack thereof displayed in some of their texts. Consequently a number of libraries created special shelf marks or locations for restricted books to ensure that only readers with a proper academic purpose might access them…
Take a tour of the restricted collections in remarkable libraries: “Do Not Read.”
* Mae West
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As we cover our eyes, we might consider censorship’s close cousin, misinformation: it was on this date in 1964 that Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A response to a reported attack by the North Vietnamese Navy on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Resolution gave President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia– a right that Johnson exercised vigorously.
In 1967, A senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation determined that the incident had not unfolded as earlier reported, and repealed the Resolution. An NSA study of the incident, declassified in 2005, put it bluntly: “It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night.”
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