“That’s What All This Wokeism Is About”

Books Erased, Printed Word Censorship, and US National Identity

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.