Mice, Slurs and Freedom Fries

American Tensions between Teaching the Literary Canon and the Need for a National Narrative in an Era of Book Bans

Abstract

In the last few years, the phenomenon of policing what should be read and how has occupied a prominent space in the American public debate. Books by authors like Toni Morrison and Art Spiegelman have been erased from school curricula and removed from public libraries. An effort at policing literature is also recognizable on the progressive side: works like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have been removed from school curricula due to the repeated use of the N-word. These events can be identified as being part of a struggle about building a comforting national American narrative. The article deals with the intersecting dynamics of policing narratives and the strife to build a reassuring (in all the different, respective acceptations of the word) national American narrative, focusing on how  different incarnations of censorship (sometimes involving the same works) concern the building of an unsettling counterpublic seeking to subvert the publicly accepted discourse about race, gender and sexual orientation.