The cultural war begins again against certain books deemed politically or morally incorrect. The demands and practices of censorship have never been so numerous for decades, and they are coming from all sides, from the left and the right.
The conservative galaxy seems particularly militant in the United States, where leaders, like Republican candidates in the elections, exploit textbooks, often for electoral purposes.
A dozen organizations representing publishers, librarians and teachers have just founded the Unite Against Book Bans coalition to fight against this wave of bans. The movement intends to get involved in the next election campaigns by questioning the candidates.
Between 1er July 2021 and March 31, 2022, nearly 1,600 books were targeted for bans (book bans) in 86 US school districts totaling nearly 2,900 schools, according to a PEN America survey. For this organization for the defense of freedom of expression, the prohibition of a work is characterized by the cancellation of the decision taken by a school or a teacher to register it in the reading program.
Florida becomes the epicenter of this fight. The Walton County School District alone has banned about 60 books from its school libraries. Governor Ron DeSantis passed a law prohibiting talking about sexual orientation in class (“Don’t Say Gay”) and another allowing parents to intervene in the choice of teaching materials. Mr. DeSantis has his sights set on the presidency in 2024, and he seems willing to make the fight against “wokism” his main electoral battle horse.
In total, 1145 censures (more than two out of three) carried out during the last nine months came from elected officials (41%) and right-wing pressure groups. State legislatures, backed by lobby groups, have passed some 60 regulations banning teachers from discussing certain topics related to race, gender and sexuality. The organism Moms for Liberty recently offered $500 to anyone who reports a teacher for the same reasons.
The blockages particularly target BIPOC (non-white) authors and members of the broad LGBTQ+ community, and even more so works featuring queer characters. The Nobel Prize for African-American literature Toni Morrison is among the authors targeted, as are Margaret Atwood and Art Spiegelman.
“We used to hear about a book challenge or ban a few times a year. Now it’s every week or every day, explained to the Guardian PEN America Executive Director Suzanne Nossel. This is part of a concerted effort to try to contain the consequences of demographic and social change by controlling the narratives accessible to young people. »
A matchstick in hand…
It is therefore like returning to the 1950s, when America tracked down communist works, but also cultural material that supposedly had a bad influence on youth. Between 1954 and 1956, in full McCarthyism, half of the comics would have been banned from newsstands.
The culture war arises again and again from a kind of critical paranoia surrounding the desire to protect children and adolescents alike, and a new battle against certain books begins. Which may seem very strange in a digital world where the copying of almost anything, including violent or pornographic images, is just a click away.
“Books, regardless of what they may say or recount on homosexuality or any other subject, are the keepers of memory,” says McGill University literature professor Arnaud Bernadet. They are signs of cultural identity, of what a community identifies with. They therefore find themselves at the center of struggles for identity and memory. He adds that the book represents knowledge and symbolically concentrates the school institution.
We used to hear about a book challenge or ban a few times a year. Now it’s weekly or daily.
“For my part, I believe that it is precisely the status of fiction that is in question, insofar as it is often assimilated to a statement of reality”, writes to the To have to Professor Pierre Hébert, from the University of Sherbrooke. He has devoted a good part of his career to the study of censorship, particularly in Quebec.
“That would explain why smoking is prohibited on a stage, as if it were a restaurant. However, you can commit a crime on stage, but not smoke; in other words, some gestures are recognized as acceptable in fiction, but others, in more recent morality, are not. This shows the complexity of the subject. »
The professor also notes that a new morality has imposed itself in recent years, without too much discernment. He gives the example of the traumatic warnings preceding certain films—violence, scenes of nudity, the use of cigarettes—underlining his astonishment at seeing all these cases placed on the same level.
To warn is one thing, and to forbid is another. Professor Hébert points out that the censorship of books today emanates from groups or individuals who feel aggrieved as readers. “Some believe that we should be able to say everything, except what is justiciable; others, that there must be limits, especially on what can be offensive. […] It’s like going back to the censorship described in The Republic of Plato: the artist can express himself, but according to the conditions dictated by the City. »