In recent years, books have become a veritable battleground in the United States between left and right. At the heart of the culture wars, he is now the target of pressure groups and elected politicians.
In Texas and Florida, real state censorship1 against librarians and teachers. The offending works often relate to issues of race and gender. Between 2021 and 2022, the association PEN America already recorded 2,532 book bans that affected 138 school districts in 32 states. Toni Morrison as John Steinbeck were targeted, without forgetting To Kill a Mocking Bird of Harper Lee or the graphic novel MAUS of Art Spiegelmann.
In these struggles, the left is not outdone, but the balance of power is not as favorable to it. The offensive we are witnessing is mainly conservative in inspiration, and clearly reflects the desire to control discourse in the public space through the dissemination and transmission of ideas.
There has been much less interest in this phenomenon on the Canadian side, with the exception of a few spectacular cases: the recent controversy which surrounded, in Quebec, story time with Barbada and the public performances of drag queens in libraries ; the book burning committed in 2019 in some schools in Ontario, the destruction of comic books and writings by young Francophones accused of damaging the image of the First Nations.
Yet the annual reports of the Intellectual Freedom Challenges Survey2 published by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations provide a more reliable overview of the identity tensions that currently cross cultural circles, although these are not commensurate with what is happening in the United States.
The latest full report available counts 73 incidents for the year 2021, a level consistently reached over the previous decade. Unsurprisingly, user requests are not limited to the relocation of books misplaced on library shelves. Because of the moral or ideological inaccuracies they find there, some readers go so far as to demand that the documents be withdrawn. For example, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe has been attacked for sexually explicit content and LGBTQ orientations. Described as “transphobic”, deemed “dangerous” and “harmful”, Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier has even sparked cabals on social media.
It’s tempting to interpret takedown requests as yet another twist on banishment culture. They are not all implemented, however. Shrier’s book remained available in public libraries in British Columbia or Nova Scotia where it had been challenged.
It is perhaps more interesting to see what arguments support these complaints. Because in addition to issues related to sexuality and gender, it is the expression of racism that is denounced by readers. The works in question are then for their “inaccurate” representation of such a group or such a community, which supposes that there would exist an ideal or true representation in the name of which it would be possible to correct the way of saying or thinking of the author of a book.
And it is because he cannot do this that the library user considers withdrawal as the best option, the one that would limit the negative influence of a work within society.
In effect, Irreversible Damage has been challenged for “promoting hatred” against sexual minorities. Of course, it is difficult to disentangle here what is hatred in the narrow sense of what is mere offense, a commonly used amalgam. But the withdrawal of a work can be, on the contrary, justified by libraries in the name of “safer collections”. We recognize here the utopia of safe spacethe desire to be able to protect the mind from the most disturbing ideas as one manages to ensure the physical integrity of individuals in a reading room.
More disturbingly, in the inventory of incidents, the (few) items that have been removed, particularly from some Ontario libraries, are all French-language titles: cowboy cat-skin of Dunand-Pallaz, Only son and proud of it by Celine Laurens, The rhinoceros horn Franquin, etc. These works intended for the most part for a young public are condemned, among other things, because they depict white characters wearing native clothes.
The ground invoked in this case by the plaintiffs is the well-known one of cultural appropriation. No one will be surprised by recalling that this concept was strongly promoted in the world of design and fashion by the American jurist Susan Scafidi and her book Who Owns Culture? Above all, it is important to underline that it tends by definition to assimilate identity to property, a category if there ever was one in capitalist ideology, and for this reason does not constitute the most adequate tool for thinking about the relations of power between cultures.
Because it is ultimately the relationships between cultures that are at the center of the book and arouse so many contrary passions, those that cross more widely democracies.