“That’s What All This Wokeism Is About”

Books Erased, Printed Word Censorship, and US National Identity

Keywords: Book bans, Culture wars, “Woke” culture, Free speech and cancel culture, American exceptionalism

Abstract

The history of US literature has been shaped, from its inception, by the fundamentally political question of who the printed word is for, and what purpose it should serve. The historical justifications given by the State for denying specific demographics’ right to literacy and access to educational institutions, by campaigners for banning individual books from classrooms, school libraries, and bookshops, and by education policy makers for including some subjects in school curricula and not others, are indicative of how (some) Americans have answered these questions.

The contributors to this Special Section of RSAJournal locate the vocabulary of censorship and discourse around free speech of the 2020s within the broader history of the liberation struggles of those groups whose representation is at the heart of contemporary discussions around the shape of school and HE curricula, reading lists, and intellectual debate, and within a wider, conservative political agenda aimed at maintaining the status quo by restricting and policing (among other things) the promotion and exercise of critical thinking, especially among young people. Studying the evolution of the public discourse around book banning and censorship, they argue, provides a valuable way for understanding, more generally, how US hegemonic powers discursively construct writing, reading, and education to maintain existing social hierarchies and shape the individual subjects within them. From this perspective, portrayals of inclusive curricula, literary works that center historically marginalized voices, and initiatives to complicate established accounts of the nation’s history as impinging on individual freedom serve to foreclose opportunities for critical reflection that might result in the questioning of the social order.

In this Introduction we zoom out from the specifics of book banning, tone policing, and curriculum reform to advance a broad-ranging structural analysis of the socio-political landscape from which these phenomena have emerged. We begin by tracing the evolution of a word, “woke,” central to free speech alarmist discourse (Section 1), which we use to analyze critiques of the so-called campus free speech crisis (Section 2). The last two sections expand our enquiry to locate this discourse within a broader culture of nostalgia apparent across the US and Western Europe (Section 3) and to analyze its metabolization by Italian media (Section 4), the latter of which provides a useful case study for understanding European free speech alarmist rhetoric as strategically leveraging longstanding European constructions of America to produce a singular affective response of disdain.

Author Biographies

Rachele Dini, Coventry University

Rachele Dini is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Coventry University, UK. She has published widely in the fields of literary waste studies, domestic space studies, nostalgia studies, gender and sexuality studies, post-45 American fiction, and advertising history. She is the author of Consumerism, Waste, and Re-Use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and “All-Electric” Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2021) and editor of Queer Trash and Feminist Excretions: New Directions in Literary and Cultural Waste Studies (SUNY Press, in preparation). Dini is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project titled Cleaning Through Crisis: Political Upheaval and the Advertising of Domestic Hygiene, 1963-2023, and writing a book on the politics of postmillennial America’s fascination with mid-century popular culture and design. Her scholarship is partly informed by her former career in advertising and market research/insight analysis. She has spoken about her work on BBC Radio 3.

Elisa Pesce, University of Glasgow

Elisa Pesce (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her project investigates the reasons underlying the omission of women from models of the maximalist novel by assessing the scope and implications of the form in the framework of contemporary cultural production in the United States. She is therefore interested in the interrelation of standards of genre formation, literary merit, and questions of power. Elisa has presented her research outputs at various international conferences and published in international journals such as JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), EJAS (European Journal of American Studies) and RIAS (Review of International American Studies).

Published
2024-07-31