Excerpt: “Censored: A Literary History of Subversion & Control”

As a lead-up to Banned Books Week, the annual celebration of the freedom to read, we’re offering an adapted excerpt of Censored: A Literary History of Subversion and Control by Mathew Fellion and Katherine Inglis.

In twenty-five chapters focusing on a wide range of texts, including the Bible, slave narratives, modernist classics, comic books, and Chicana/o literature, the authors chart the forces that have driven censorship in the United Kingdom and the United States for over six hundred years. A vital reminder that the freedom of speech has always been fragile and never enjoyed equally by all, Censored offers lessons from the past to guard against threats to literature in a new political era.

The following adapted excerpt examines some recent cases and implications of banned books in the US, and the ways such censorship has been challenged.

The term “banned books” brings to mind cases in which civil liberties have been unjustly curtailed, either by the state or by an institution, usually a school. Each year the American Library Association (ALA) announces the top ten “most frequently banned and challenged books”, based on media reports and records of challenges submitted by librarians to the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Banning” refers to a wide variety of censorship practices, however, which are not always easy to distinguish from ordinary processes of selection. In the United States, school boards are generally responsible for determining which books are included in curricula and which are not—and, because not every book can or should be taught at every level, these decisions need to be made. When does a decision about the educational suitability of a book become a ban? And what other kinds of censorship, potentially more dangerous, lurk beyond the banned books?

On 15 March 2013, students protested outside Lane Tech, a high school in Chicago. They held up banners reading “Honk if you love free speech,” “Let us read,” and “Free Persepolis.” At Social Justice High School, students held a “read-in,” gathering together to read a “banned” book. Chicago students were asserting their right to read the acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the first volume of Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of life in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War. Persepolis had been held in many Chicago school libraries and taught in classes from the seventh grade upwards. Earlier that week, however, managerial staff of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) had ordered principals to retrieve every copy of the book from classrooms and school libraries. The order was urgent, unexpected, and unexplained. As school officials began collecting the books, students asked why the book was being withdrawn and on whose authority. Students at Lane Tech checked out copies from the school library and used social media to publicize the withdrawal. A student journalist, Matthew Wettig, obtained a written comment from Satrapi herself: “shame on them!” When international media picked up on the story, a local reporter dubbed it “Persepolgate.” On the day of the students’ protest, CPS changed its stance. The book was to be removed from the seventh grade curriculum but, crucially, not from school libraries. Persepolis had been unbanned. Later that year, the Illinois Library Association awarded Lane Tech students and the school’s 451 Degrees Banned Books Club its Intellectual Freedom Award in recognition of their advocacy.

As a freedom of information request by librarian Jarrett Dapier revealed, CPS found two pages of Persepolis inappropriate for children. These pages depict the young Satrapi’s encounters with state violence in Iran. She learns about the brutal suppression of political dissent during the Shah’s regime, and, after the Shah is overthrown, of religious and political dissent in the new Islamic Republic. The first page shows Satrapi’s mother’s distress after she is verbally abused in the street. Satrapi does not illustrate the incident itself, but she tells the story in her mother’s words. Two “fundamentalist bastards,” her mother says, threatened her with sexual assault because she was not wearing the veil. “They insulted me,” she tells her husband and daughter: “They said that women like me should be pushed up against a wall and fucked, and then thrown in the garbage.” A panel on the same page shows a spokesman for the Islamic Republic regime announcing that wearing the veil is now obligatory in order to protect women from rapists. The page makes clear that sexual and political violence are intertwined, connecting a street assault with the misogynistic and paternalist rhetoric of the regime. Similarly, the second page to which CPS objected connects physical violence with assaults on personal freedom. The page depicts a frank conversation about torture between political prisoners who had been incarcerated during the Shah’s rule and released after the Islamic Revolution. A large panel depicts the “worst torture” described by the prisoners, which was inflicted on their friend Ahmadi: he was whipped, urinated on, and burned with an iron. Satrapi listens to the prisoners, unnoticed. She struggles to cope with what she has overheard, first enacting their stories in violent games, then trying (and failing) to forgive the torturers as she thinks she ought to, only partly consoled by her mother’s promise that the torturers will pay. Persepolis is a book about a young girl who is forced to confront a violent reality at a young age. The question for educators in CPS was whether the children in their care should learn about this reality, and if so at what age and how. There were genuine curricular and pedagogical issues for CPS management to consider, but its rapid, unilateral action angered students and raised constitutional questions for librarians.

School book censorship in the United States can involve curricular decisions, where a school board decides to remove a book from its curriculum, and library access changes, where a school removes or restricts access to a book in the library. The final outcome of the Persepolis case—dropped from part of the curriculum, retained in the library—is consistent with the current state of US case law. A line of cases descending from Board of Education v. Pico and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier has established that the constitutional threshold for excluding and restricting access to books is set far higher in libraries than it is in classrooms. Courts do not generally interfere with pedagogical judgements, though they will examine school boards’ motivations to confirm that their judgements are pedagogical. In Pico, the Supreme Court ruled that a trial should take place to examine the motivations of the Island Trees Union Free School District Board of Education, which had removed nine books from libraries in 1975, including Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Pico’s plurality opinion (the argument made by the only three justices who agreed on the reasoning behind the decision) is not legally binding, but has guided later cases, particularly the argument that it is unconstitutional for a school board to remove books from libraries in a “narrowly partisan or political manner.” The plurality also argued that the constitution’s protection of the freedom of speech necessarily involves the freedom to “receive ideas,” an interpretation of the First Amendment that the ALA and intellectual freedom organizations have embraced, using it to advocate for the “freedom to read.” Courts have applied the Pico plurality’s reasoning to establish that school boards cannot remove books from school libraries or restrict students’ access to them simply because they dislike or disagree with their contents.

The recall of Persepolis was in progress when CPS realized that it should not have ordered principals to remove the book from school libraries. The student protests and international attention may have influenced CPS, but the deciding factor was its own policy on libraries. On 13 March 2013 CPS circulated an urgent update informing “High School Chiefs” that they could not remove copies of the book from libraries without following CPS’s collection development policy. This policy contained strong protections against the unconstitutional removal of books from school libraries. It set out criteria for the selection, removal, and replacement of materials, following principles set out in the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights and Illinois School Library Media Association guidelines. When considering individual works, the value of the work as a whole was supposed to be given greater weight than isolated excerpts. The policy also directed librarians to consider factors such as the reputation of the author, appeal to library users, artistic and literary quality, reading level, and educational significance. If a formal challenge were made to a book, a review committee would weigh these factors before deciding to remove the book from the library. CPS had not followed this procedure with Persepolis, and so, according to its own policy, it had exceeded its authority by trying to remove Persepolis from school libraries without consultation.

Censorship is inevitably part of curriculum management. School boards are expected to make informed judgements about the age appropriateness and educational suitability of reading materials when they compile curricula, which necessarily involves judgements about the potential effects of the material on children. Parties may disagree about those judgements—the ALA may think that Persepolis is suitable for twelve-year-olds, and CPS may think it is not. CPS’s decision may well have been over-cautious or misguided, yet if the responsibility for making judgements about books were taken away from school boards, the result could be more widespread censorship. In recent years, legislators have developed new strategies that have the potential to undermine schools’ control over what students read in classrooms.

In Virginia in 2016, Republican-sponsored House Bill 516 required teachers to notify parents of any course materials containing “sexually explicit” content, and to provide children with alternative assignments if the parents objected. The bill became known as the “Beloved Bill,” because those who proposed and supported it cited Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved as the kind of book parents should be able to prevent their children reading in school. (Senator Richard H. Black described the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a formerly enslaved woman as “smut” and “profoundly filthy.”) The bill passed, but Governor Terry McAuliffe, who thought it would permit books to be declared “sexually explicit” based on passages taken out of context, vetoed it. As of 2013, 48 per cent of Virginia schools already gave parents advance notice of “potentially sensitive or controversial material” in classrooms.

In Arizona, Republican legislators developed a law that enables the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to interfere with curriculum design. In 2010 the House of Representatives passed House Bill 2281, prohibiting schools from teaching courses that “Promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “Promote resentment against a race or class of people,” “Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” or “Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” While the bill purported to be an anti-racist measure, a court recently decided that this purpose was only a pretext. In fact, the law was specifically crafted to target the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District, a pedagogically successful program that Republican politicians characterized as racist and seditious. Tom Horne, Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction, claimed that teachers were promoting “ethnic chauvinism” and advancing a “radical separatist agenda.” Under the threat of losing funding, the school board withdrew seven textbooks from classrooms: Message to Aztlán by Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales; Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by Rodolfo Acuña; Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire; Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic; Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement by F. Arturo Rosales; Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson; and 500 Años del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martinez. Despite protests by students and other members of the community, including the student activist group UNIDOS (United Non-Discriminatory Individuals Demanding Our Studies), the school board shut down the program. Other books on Mexican American Studies curriculum lists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, were not specifically banned, but the school board had dismantled the framework in which they were being taught.

Teachers and students in the department challenged the anti-ethnic studies statute in court on constitutional grounds. Though only the prohibition against courses “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” was struck down as overbroad, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit remanded the case for a trial to establish the motivations of the lawmakers responsible for the law, particularly Tom Horne and his successor as Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal. Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled on 22 August 2017 that the passing and enforcement of HB 2281 had been motivated by “racial animus” against Mexican American people, and had therefore violated students’ rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Judge Tashima found a number of signs that the campaign against the program, which Horne called his “crusade”, was discriminatory. Most tellingly, while in public office, Huppenthal had used pseudonyms to post inflammatory comments online about the Mexican American Studies Department and Mexican American people. He likened the department to the KKK and to Nazis, and on one occasion wrote, “No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish TV stations, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English.”

While legislation like the Beloved Bill and HB 2281 might not look like book bans on the surface, such legislation can produce more widespread, indiscriminate, and partisan censorship than the more common practice of school boards making judgements about the educational suitability of particular books. These judgements will always have the potential for controversy, because there will never be consensus about what limitations on children’s reading are acceptable. Somebody who believes that the images in Persepolis are appropriate for twelve-year-old students will be likely to draw a line at some other image, or some other age. The question is who gets to draw the lines. For now, school boards exercise their discretion, subject to their own policies and the Constitution, and overseen by the courts. The ALA and other intellectual freedom organizations will continue to champion students’ freedom to read and lobby against censorship decisions that they perceive to threaten that freedom. Their activism keeps censorship in the public eye, encouraging vigilance and awareness of the constitutional implications of book removals. The database of bans and challenges will continue to grow, but not all challenges will become bans, and not all bans will survive popular outcry or judicial review.

As part of Banned Books Week, authors Katherine Inglis and Matthew Fellion will be talking about their book and the history of literary censorship at two events in the UK.

The first event will take place on 27 September, 2017 in Norwich, UK. Offered by the Book Hive , this event forms part of the first Banned Books Week in the UK and is organised by the Index on Censorship. More information >

The second event will take place on 29 September, 2017 in Edinburgh, UK. Lighthouse Bookshop will welcome the authors for a unique celebration of free speech and intellectual freedom as part of Banned Books Week. More information >