This study traces the way in which the librarian as the guardian of the freedom to read came to replace the librarian as moral censor. This shift in ideology is traced against a backdrop of major social and literary changes. Within this context, censorship is treated as part of a broader professional ideology of book selection. Geller treats that ideology in terms of three constant dilemmas of choice: populism vs. elitism, neutrality vs. advocacy, and freedom vs. censorship. By exploring the ways in which librarians as public servants have defined their selection policies in terms of the public interest, she sheds new light on the complex historical background and shifting social values that underlie contemporary policy alternatives.

Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century brings together a range of international scholars for a reexamination of Ivan Goncharov's life and work through a twenty-first century critical lens. Contributions to the volume highlight Goncharov's service career, the complex and understudied manifestation of Realism in his work, the diverse philosophical threads that shape his novels, and the often colliding contexts of writer and imperial bureaucrat in the 1858 travel text Frigate Pallada. Chapters engage with approaches from post-colonial and queer studies, theories of genre and the novel, desire, laughter, technology, and mobility and travel.

A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite-illiberalism-abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today's liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism-a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.

After being forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange is now in a high security prison in London where he faces extradition to the United States and imprisonment for the rest of his life. The charges Assange faces are a major threat to press freedom. James Goodale, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, commented: "The charge against Assange for 'conspiring' with a source is the most dangerous I can think of with respect to the First Amendment in all my years representing media organizations." It is critical now to build support for Assange and prevent his delivery into the hands of the Trump administration. That is the urgent purpose of this book. A wide range of distinguished contributors, many of them in original pieces, here set out the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the importance of their work, and the dangers for us all in the persecution they face. In Defense of Julian Assange is a vivid, vital intervention into one of the most important political issues of our day.

Like every authoritarian regime in history, Nazi Germany tried to inhibit ideological freedom through book censorship. Between 1933 and 1945, Hitler's party orchestrated a massive campaign to take control of all forms of communication in the nation. Although Nazi propaganda has been widely studied, modern historians have decidedly neglected book censorship. In this book, noted scholar Guenter Lewy offers the first comprehensive analysis in English language of the ways in which the Nazis exerted control over the creation, publication, and distribution of books by authors, publishers, bookstores, and libraries. While Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry played a leading role, other entities engaged in censorship, including the Ministry of Science, Education and Popular Culture, Rosenberg's Office for the Advancement of German Literature, and Bouhler's Party Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature. The Gestapo and the Security Service were also involved in the process of enforcement. All of these organizations often acted on their own initiative both on the state and on the local level. As a result of these overlapping jurisdictions, the process of control was disorderly. This illustrates once again that the Third Reich was monolithic in theory but polycratic in practice. This book explores not only how the Nazis implemented book censorship, but also the ways in which this process affected German intellectuals. It deals with the controversial issue of the so-called "inner immigrants" - authors who were opposed to National Socialism but chose to remain in Germany and concealed the true meaning of their writings by way of allegories or parables, such as Gottfried Benn, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ernst Junger, Jochen Klepper, and Ernst Wiechert. Describing the fate of writers and publishers who came into conflict with the organs of censorship, Lewy provides a disconcerting and realistic portrait of intellectual life under the Nazi dictatorship.

Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to burn the cover of his widely successful novel, The Book of Negroes, in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions in people in the age of the Internet? Is banning, censoring, or controlling book distribution ever justified? Hill illustrates his ideas with anecdotes and lists names of Canadian writers who faced censorship challenges in the twenty-first century, inviting conversation between those on opposite sides of these contentious issues. All who are interested in literature, freedom of expression, and human rights will enjoy reading Hill's provocative essay.

In this first full-length study on the topic, Matthew Hunt-with access to rare and controversial films-provides a history of film censorship in Thailand. Hunt outlines its beginnings in the country, when films were censored by the police for political and ideological reasons, rather than on the basis of taste and decency, to the present when issues such as politics, religion, and sex are the main reasons films are banned. He also examines how Thai filmmakers approach culturally sensitive subjects and how their films have been censored as a result. Hunt presents interviews with ten leading directors, including conversations with Thai New Wave veterans Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-ek Ratanaruang. In these interviews, the directors discuss their most controversial films, which range from mainstream studio movies to independent arthouse releases, and explain their responses to censorship.

Winner of the 2020 R. Gapper Prize for the Best Book in French Studies Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Regina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.

A commitment to free speech is a fundamental precept of all liberal democracies. However, democracies can differ significantly when addressing the constitutionality of laws regulating certain kinds of speech. In the United States, for instance, the commitment to free speech under the First Amendment has been held by the Supreme Court to protect the public expression of the most noxious racist ideology and hence to render unconstitutional even narrow restrictions on hate speech. In contrast, governments have been accorded considerable leeway to restrict racist and other extreme expression in almost every other democracy, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. This book considers the legal responses of various liberal democracies towards hate speech and other forms of extreme expression, and examines the following questions:
What accounts for the marked differences in attitude towards the constitutionality of hate speech regulation?
Does hate speech regulation violate the core free speech principle constitutive of democracy?
Has the traditional US position on extreme expression justifiably not found favor elsewhere?
Do values such as the commitment to equality or dignity legitimately override the right to free speech in some circumstances?
With contributions from experts in a range of disciplines, this book offers an in-depth examination of the tensions that arise between democracy's promises.
Readership Academics, scholars, and advanced students of Human Rights; Comparative Human Rights; Freedom of Information & Freedom of Speech; Media, Information, & Communication Industries; Censorship; Extreme Speech & Hate Speech

Fans and detractors of popular music tend to agree on one thing: popular music is a bellwether of an individual's political and cultural values. In the United States, for example, one cannot think of the counterculture apart from its music. For that reason, in virtually every country in the world, some group identifies popular music as a source of potential danger and wants to regulate it. "Policing Pop" looks into the many ways in which popular music and artists around the world are subjected to censorship, ranging from state control and repression to the efforts of special interest or religious groups to limit expression. The essays collected here focus on the forms of censorship as well as specific instances of how the state and other agencies have attempted to restrict the types of music produced, recorded and performed within a culture. Several show how even unsuccessful attempts to exert the power of the state can cause artists to self-censor. Others point to material that taxes even the most liberal defenders of free speech. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that censoring agents target popular music all over the world, and they raise questions about how artists and the public can resist the narrowing of cultural expression. Author note: Martin Cloonan teaches Popular Music Culture at the University of Glasgow and is the author of "Banned! Censorship of Popular Music in Britain, 1967-1992". Reebee Garofalo is Professor at the College of Public and Community Service and is affiliated with the American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; his most recent book is "Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA".

The Culture of Secrecy is the first comprehensive study of the restriction of official information in modern British history. It seeks to understand why secrets have been kept, and how systems of control have been constructed - and challenged - over the past hundred and sixty years. The author transcends the conventional boundaries of political or social history in his wide-ranging diagnosis of the `British disease' - the legal forms and habits of mind which together have constituted the national tradition of discreet reserve. The chapters range across bureaucrats and ballots, gossip and gay rights, doctors and dole investigators in their exploration of the ethical basis of power in the public, professional, commercial and domestic spheres. Professor Vincent examines concepts such as privacy and confidentiality, honour and integrity, openness and freedom of expression, which have served as benchmarks in the development of the liberal state and society.

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.

Censorship pervades all aspects of political, social and cultural life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Faced with strict state control of cultural output, Iranian authors and writers have had to adapt their work to avoid falling foul of the censors. In this pioneering study, Alireza Abiz offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of how censorship and the political order of Iran have influenced contemporary Persian literature, both in terms of content and tone. As censorship is unrecorded and not officially acknowledged in Iran, the author has examined newspaper records and conducted first-hand interviews with Iranian poets and writers. looking into the ways in which poets and writers attempt to subvert the codes of censorship by using symbolism and figurative language to hide their more controversial messages. A ground-breaking analysis, this book will be vital reading for anyone interested in contemporary cultural politics and literature in Iran.

Political races in the United States rely heavily on highly paid political consultants. In Building a Business of Politics, Adam Sheingate traces the history of political consultants from its origins in the publicity experts and pollsters of the 1920s and 1930s to the strategists and media specialists of the 1970s who transformed political campaigns into a highly profitable business. Today, consultants command a hefty fee from politicians as they turn campaign cash from special interest groups and wealthy donors into the advertisements, polls, and direct mail solicitations characteristic of modern campaigns. The implications of this system on the state of American democracy are significant: a professional political class stands between the voters and those who claim to represent them. Building a Business of Politics is both a definitive account of the consulting profession and a powerful reinterpretation of how political professionals reshaped American democracy in the modern era.

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.

Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev were among the most acclaimed authors of samizdat, the literature that was self-published in the former Soviet Union in order to evade censorship and prosecution. In Uncensored, Ann Komaromi uses their work to argue for a far more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of samizdat, showing how the material circumstances of its creation and dissemi nation exercised a profound influence on the very idea of dissidence, reconfiguring the relationship between author and reader. Using archival research to fully illustrate samizdat's social and historical context, Komaromi arrives at a more nuanced theoretical position that breaks down the opposition between the autonomous work of art and direct political engagement. The similarities between samizdat and digital culture have particular relevance for contemporary discourses of dissident subjectivity.

From the U.S. Navy's 1934 confiscation of a painting of sailors on shore leave to contemporary culture wars over funding for the arts, conflicts surrounding homosexuality and creative freedom have shaped the history of modern art in America. Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation tells the charged story of this strife through pioneering analysis of the works of gay artists and the circumstances under which these works have been attacked, suppressed, or censored outright. Focusing on the careers of Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury, and Holly Hughes, Outlaw Representation explores how gay artists responded to the threat of censorship by producing their own "outlaw representations" of homosexuality. Instead of acquiescing to attacks on their work as indecent or obscene, these artists used the outlaw status of homosexuality to propose new forms of social, sexual, and creative life.

Richly illustrated, Outlaw Representation includes close to 200 striking images, ranging from the art of celebrated figures such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe to physique-magazine photographs and gay liberation posters. Throughout, images that once provoked censorship now elicit close visual analysis and careful historical investigation. Engagingly written and sweepingly researched, Outlaw Representation promises to be a landmark in the study of twentieth-century American art, politics, and sexuality.

The BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a three-part TV series on the circumstances leading to the overthrow, trial and execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. As rehearsals were about to begin, the BBC hierarchy - under pressure from the Foreign Office - decided to cancel the project. Why? General Zia ul Haq, the dictator at the time, was leading the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He was backed by the USA. According to expert legal opinion, there was a possibility of a whole range of defamation suits from the head of state to judges involved in the case. In consequence, it was decided not to broadcast this hard-hitting and provocative play.

The Leopard and the Fox presents both the script and the story of censorship.

"Manifestos For The Twenty-First Century" is a Seagull Series created in collaboration with Index On Censorship, a home and a voice for freedom of expression since it was founded in 1972. Despite Western culture's roots and much touted pride in its classical Greek and Roman legacy, the sexual freedoms of the ancient world have had no place in the official cultures of Western societies. As late as the 19th Century, homosexuality was the "love that dare not speak its name". In "Censoring Sexuality", Paul Bailey examines and analyses the various kinds of censorship - political, literary, cultural - which have oppressed and silenced homosexual men and women. Such a history of censorship extends, of course, way beyond Europe. American puritanism has hugely impacted not only on the lives but also the art works of writers and film-makers whilst the moral values of Hollywood have influenced generations. Discussing artists as diverse as Marcel Proust, Benjamin Britten, WH Auden and Terence Rattigan, Saki and Ronald Firbank, "Censoring Sexuality" explores the true nature of "camp" and the rich tradition of subversive and comic art created by the censoring of the sexual.

In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure.
Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to "make it" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishment; the issue was not "making it," but simply "making do."
Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.