Contemporary Singapore is simultaneously a small postcolonial multicultural nation state and a cosmopolitan global city. To manage fundamental contradictions, the state takes the lead in authoring the national narrative. This is partly an internal process of nation building, but it is also achieved through more commercially motivated and outward facing efforts at nation and city branding. Both sets of processes contribute to Singapore's capacity to influence foreign affairs, if only for national self-preservation. For a small state with resource limitations, this is mainly through the exercise of smart power, or the ability to strategically combine soft and hard power resources.

A groundbreaking and surprising look at contemporary censorship in China As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be easily evaded by savvy internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese internet and leaks from China's Propaganda Department, Roberts sheds light on how censorship influences the Chinese public. Drawing parallels between censorship in China and the way information is manipulated in the United States and other democracies, she reveals how internet users are susceptible to control even in the most open societies. Censored gives an unprecedented view of how governments encroach on the media consumption of citizens.

"Defacement" asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in "the public secret"--defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated.
Arguing that this sort of knowledge ("knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."

Stage or film presentations of Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alfie, and Darling were much changed, even transformed, by censorship between 1955-1965. Indeed, censorship altered the progression of the artistic and creative renaissance of the period, and John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Alan Sillitoe, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and John Schlesinger are just a few of the people who were forced to change their work.

Censorship and the Permissive Society explores the predicament writers and directors faced, and highlights the debate over the liberalizing or progressive aspects of the sea changes affecting British society at the time.

The governmental pledge to the American people is found in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Written more than two hundred years ago, these words now protect a wide range of expressive activity. Revolutionary Sparks is a broadgauged discussion of freedom of expression in America that begins by studying the period after the Civil War and Reconstruction when new and unsettling ideas appeared with great regularity on the American scene. These ideas were so widespread during this period that the nation's leaders often joined forces to repress aberrant notions. In response to such suppression, individuals seeking to better their lives through the expression of new ideas began to demand their rights to speak, write, and associate together to advance their points of view. With a broad grounding in political and social history, rather than the more prevalent legalistic orientation, Blanchard traces this contest for control through the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the Reagan and early Bush administrations. Presenting the first comprehensive history of freedom of speech, Blanchard ranges from questions of national security to those of public morality, from loyalty during times of national stress to the right to preach on a public street corner. Including examinations of controversies involving the press, the national government, the Supreme Court, and civil liberties and civil rights concerns, Revolutionary Sparks presents a strong case for the right of Americans to speak their minds and to have access to the knowledge necessary for informed self-government.

Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library's inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects. Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson's Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby "buries," difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference. Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information-as well as categories of difference-in American culture.

Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.
J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.
From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, "Giving Offense" focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.
"The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."--Kenneth Baker, "San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"
"Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."--"Kirkus Reviews"
"These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and Rene; Girard.Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."--Bill Marx, "Hungry Mind Review"
"An extraordinary collection of essays."--Martha Bayles, "New York Times Book Review"
"A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."--Richard Eder, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

In 1950 Ruth W. Brown, librarian at the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Public Library, was summarily dismissed from her job after thirty years of exemplary service, ostensibly because she had circulated subversive materials. In truth, however, Brown was fired because she had become active in promoting racial equality and had helped form a group affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality.

Louise S. Robbins tells the story of the political, social, economic, and cultural threads that became interwoven in a particular time and place, creating a strong web of opposition. This combination of forces ensnared Ruth Brown and her colleagues-for the most part women and African Americans-who championed the cause of racial equality.

This episode in a small Oklahoma town almost a half-century ago is more than a disturbing local event. It exemplifies the McCarthy era, foregrounding those who labored for racial justice, sometimes at great cost, before the civil rights movement. In addition, it reveals a masking of concerns that led even Brown's allies to obscure the cause of racial integration for which she fought. Relevant today, Ruth Brown's story helps us understand the matrix of personal, community, state, and national forces that can lead to censorship, intolerance, and the suppression of individual rights.

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It examines the various causes and uses of image/property defacement as a tool of political, national, religious and artistic process. This is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks, and it examines the implications of iconoclasm as a form of control, censorship and expression.

"A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will." So writes Jonathan Rauch in "Kindly Inquisitors, " which has challenged readers for more than twenty years with its bracing and provocative exploration of the issues surrounding attempts to limit free speech. In it, Rauch makes a persuasive argument for the value of "liberal science" and the idea that conflicting views produce knowledge within society.
In this expanded edition of "Kindly Inquisitors, " a new foreword by George F. Will strikingly shows the book's continued relevance, while a substantial new afterword by Rauch elaborates upon his original argument and brings it fully up to date. Two decades after the book's initial publication, while some progress has been made, the regulation of hate speech has grown domestically--especially in American universities--and has spread even more internationally, where there is no First Amendment to serve as a meaningful check. But the answer to bias and prejudice, Rauch argues, is pluralism--not purism. Rather than attempting to legislate bias and prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, we must pit them against one another to foster a more vigorous and fruitful discussion. It is this process that has been responsible for the growing acceptance of the moral acceptability of homosexuality over the last twenty years. And it is this process, Rauch argues, that will enable us as a society to replace hate with knowledge, both ethical and empirical.
"It is a melancholy fact that this elegant book, which is slender and sharp as a stiletto, is needed, now even more than two decades ago. Armed with it, readers can slice through the pernicious ideas that are producing the still-thickening thicket of rules, codes, and regulations restricting freedom of thought and expression."--George F. Will, from the foreword

Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct. When critics today complain that it is ubiquitous but lacks the serious bite of classical Cynicism, they express concern that it can now only be corrosively negative. The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time takes a more balanced view. Re-evaluating the role of cynicism in literature, cultural criticism, and philosophy from 1840 to the present, it treats cynic confrontationalism as a widely-employed credibility-check on the promotion of moral ideals-with roots in human psychology. Helen Small investigates how writers have engaged with Cynic traditions of thought, and later more gestural styles of cynicism, to re-calibrate dominant moral values, judgements of taste, and political agreements. The argument develops through a series of cynic challenges to accepted moral thinking: Friedrich Nietzsche on morality; Thomas Carlyle v. J. S. Mill on the permissible limits of moral provocation; Arnold on the freedom of criticism; George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford on cosmopolitanism; Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis on the conditions of work in the university. The Function of Cynicism treats topics of present-day public concern: abrasive styles of public argument; debasing challenges to conventional morality; free speech, moral controversialism; the authority of reason and the limits of that authority; nationalism and resistance to nationalism; and liberty of expression as a core principle of the university.

Following the dramatic events of July 2016, the global spotlight has fallen on Turkey's increasingly authoritarian government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. International observers fear the attempted coup has given Erdogan, already known for his attacks on press freedom, an excuse to further suppress all opposition.In November 2015, Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of the national Cumhuriyet newspaper, was arrested on charges of espionage, helping a terrorist organisation, trying to topple the government and revealing state secrets. His transgression? Publishing photographic evidence of a highly illegal covert arms shipment by the Turkish secret service to radical Islamist organisations fighting government forces in Syria - a crime that was in the government's interest to conceal, and a journalist's duty to expose.Arraigned by the President himself, who called for Dundar to receive two life sentences, he was held in solitary confinement in Turkey's Silivri Prison for three months while awaiting trial.We Are Arrested is Dundar's enthralling account of the newspaper's decision to publish and the events that unfolded as a result - including would-be suicide bombings, assassination attempts and fierce attacks from pro-government media - as well as the time he served behind bars for defending the public's right to know.

Immerse yourself in the stories behind the most shocking and infamous books ever published! Censorship of one form or another has existed almost as long as the written word, while definitions of what is deemed "acceptable" in published works have shifted over the centuries, and from culture to culture. Banned Books explores why some of the world's most important literary classics and seminal non-fiction titles were once deemed too controversial for the public to read - whether for challenging racial or sexual norms, satirizing public figures, or simply being deemed unfit for young readers. From the banning of All Quiet on the Western Front and the repeated suppression of On the Origin of the Species, to the uproar provoked by Lady Chatterley's Lover, entries offer a fascinating chronological account of censorship and the astonishing role that some banned books have played in changing history. Packed with eye-opening insights into the history of the written word and the political and social climate during the period of suppression or censorship, this is a must-read for anyone interested in literature; creative writing; politics; history or law. Delve into this compelling collection of the world's most controversial books to discover: - Covers a broad range of genres and subject areas in fiction and non-fiction, ranging from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Spycatcher - Offers informative insights into society, politics, law, and religious belief, in different countries around the world - Features images of first editions and specially commissioned illustrations of the books' authors - Includes extracts from the banned books along with key quotations about them - Completely global in scope A must-have volume for avid readers and literary scholars alike, alongside those with an interest in the law, politics and censorship, Banned Books profiles a selection of the most infamous, intriguing and controversial books ever written, whilst offering a unique perspective on the history of the written world - with insights into the often surprising reasons books have been banned throughout history and across the world. Whether as a gift or self-purchase, this brilliant book is a must-have addition to the library of curious thinkers, borrowers and lifelong learners. If you enjoy Banned Books, then why not try Great Loves - the first title in DK's quirky new hardback series, full of insightful and intriguing topics.

Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on 'no platforming' by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel. This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.

Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library's inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects. Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson's Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby "buries," difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference. Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information-as well as categories of difference-in American culture.

This is the first volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's well-reviewed four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence archives. It charts the period before 1932, when theatre was seen as a crucial medium with the power to shape society, determining what people believed and how they behaved. It uncovers the differing views and the disputes which occurred among and between the Lord Chamberlain and his Readers and Advisers, and discusses the extensive pressures exerted on him by bodies such as the Public Morality Council, the Church, the monarch, government departments, foreign embassies, newspapers, powerful individuals and those claiming to represent national or international opinion. The book explores the portrayal of a broad range of topics in relation to censorship, including the First World War, race and inter-racial relationships, contemporary and historical international conflicts, horror, sexual freedom and morality, class, the monarchy, and religion. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/LXOK1281

Film Censorship is a concise overview of Hollywood censorship and efforts to regulate American films. It provides a lean introductory survey of U.S. cinema censorship from the pre-Code years and classic studio system Golden Age-in which film censorship thrived-to contemporary Hollywood. From the earliest days of cinema, movies faced controversy over screen images and threats of censorship. This volume draws extensively on primary research from motion picture archives to unveil the fascinating behind-the-scenes history of cinema censorship and explore how Hollywood responded to censorial constraints on screen content in a changing American cultural and industrial landscape. This primer on American film censorship considers the historical evolution of motion-picture censorship in the United States spanning the Jazz Age Prohibition era, lobbying by religious groups against Hollywood, industry self-censorship for the Hays Office, federal propaganda efforts during wartime, easing of regulation in the 1950s and 1960s, the MPAA ratings system, and the legacy of censorship in later years. Case studies include The Outlaw, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Scarface, Double Indemnity, Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, and The Exorcist, among many others.

This is the second volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's well-reviewed four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. It covers the period from 1933 to 1952, and focuses on theatre censorship during the period before the outbreak of the Second World War, during the war itself, and in the immediate post-war period. The focus is primarily on political and moral censorship. The book documents and analyses the control exercised by the Lord Chamberlain. It also reviews the pressures exerted on him and on the theatre by the government, the monarch, the Church, foreign embassies and by influential public figures and organisations. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/SGLU9228

Free Expression and Democracy takes on the assumption that limits on free expression will lead to authoritarianism or at least a weakening of democracy. That hypothesis is tested by an examination of issues involving expression and their treatment in countries included on The Economist's list of fully functioning democracies. Generally speaking, other countries allow prohibitions on hate speech, limits on third-party spending on elections, and the protection of children from media influences seen as harmful. Many ban Holocaust denial and the desecration of national symbols. Yet, these other countries all remain democratic, and most of those considered rank more highly than the United States on the democracy index. This book argues that while there may be other cultural values that call for more expansive protection of expression, that protection need not reach the level present in the United States in order to protect the democratic nature of a country.

Zinnophobia offers an extended defense of the work of radical historian Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States, against his many critics. It includes a discussion of the attempt to ban Zinn's book from Indiana classrooms; a brief summary of Zinn's life and work; an analysis of Zinn's theorizing about bias and objectivity in history; and a detailed response to twenty-five of Zinn's most hostile critics, many of whom are (or were) eminent historians. 'A major contribution to bringing Zinn's great contributions to even broader public attention, and exposing features of intellectual and political culture that are of no little interest.' Noam Chomsky

This is the third volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's comprehensive four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced for ever, Censorship of British Drama demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped the theatre voices of this decade. The book charts the early struggles with Royal Court writers such as John Osborne and with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; the stand-offs with Samuel Beckett and with leading American dramatists; the Lord Chamberlain's determination to keep homosexuality off the stage, which turned him into a laughing stock when he was unable to prevent a private theatre club in London's West End from staging a series of American plays he had banned, including Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the Lord Chamberlain's attempts to persuade the government to give him new powers and to rewrite the law. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/SEEA6021