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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Ferrari
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.