viz. - censorship

A New Version of the South's History for Students of "NewSouth"

james.wiedner — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 03:39:23 +0000

Image Credits: Amazon.com

In researching and writing my last blog posting, which sought to explore the possible dangers associated with the expurgation of the literary classics we use in the school setting, I found myself digging a little deeper into a story from a couple of years ago that I was only vaguely familiar with. In that last posting, I focused upon the ways in which e-books were, by the nature of the medium, particularly susceptible to modification and/or censorship. But these concerns are not ones we should only ascribe to the digital; I wanted to demonstrate that modification of canonical works for the purpose of “protecting” people from any content that might be unpleasant to the modern reader’s sensibilities can and does happen with our “old-fashioned” paper textbooks, too.

With that intent in mind, I mentioned an incident a couple of years ago where a publisher put together an edition of “Huckleberry Finn” specifically intended for classroom use that had been substantively edited from cover-to-cover. To wit: NewSouth Books saw it fit to publish a copy of the American classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that had been modified roughly 300 times by “Mark Twain expert” Dr. Alan Gribben. Gribben took it upon himself to rewrite “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by replacing every instance of the word “nigger” with “slave,” “injun” with “Indian,” and “half-breed” with “half-blood” (cite).

Dr. Gribben, (who, incidentally, was a professor for nearly two decades at UT, a fact about which we should all be proud) composed an introduction to this new version of Twain’s masterpiece wherein he attempts to justify his rewriting; a portion of this Introduction is available on the publisher’s website. NewSouth describes Dr. Gribben’s introduction as one that “eloquently develops” the “bold move compassionately advocated by Gribben” to sanitize the book in a way that Gribben didn’t find so personally offensive.

Reading this introduction is nothing short of amazing in the arrogance, hypocrisy, and short-sightedness it depicts. To mention just one the introduction’s many stand-out moments (it would be impossible to go through them all), Dr. Gribben attempts to justify his decision to rewrite Twain’s canonical work by lamenting the “occasional efforts of rap and hip-hop musicians to appropriate [the N-Word].” The person who felt they were within their rights in determining how the “N-Word” can and cannot be used in classic literature is simultaneously wagging his finger at two overwhelmingly African-American genres of music for “appropriating” that word?

Seriously?

Frighteningly, Dr. Gribben created the new version of Twain with the specific intent that his rendition of Twain would be more appropriate in the context of the classroom. Apparently, maintaining literary integrity is not worth the White Guilt that comes along with remembering this shameful chapter of the past.

Even more frightening is the fact that there is no way the typical reader would know from looking at the textbook that it was anything other than Mark Twain’s words, as he wrote them. Neither Dr. Gribben nor NewSouth Publishing is making any effort to make the reader aware that what they are purchasing/studying/assuming to be authentic. A side-by-side comparison of NewSouth’s edited version and what is arguably the definitive version of the book can be found at the top of this post.

Is there anything that would make it obvious to any reader- much less a student- that the author’s text is respected in one, and revised in the other? It is precisely because the book is designed such that it could easily be mistaken for the Real McCoy that the actions of Dr. Gribben and NewSouth are so contemptible and dangerous. Below, I've suggested some edits to NewSouth's present cover that would help eliminate reader confusion between the altered and authentic versions. Even if the damage has already been done with NewSouth's first literary miscarriage, they will have a chance to do right when their follow-up edition is published. I, for one, can't wait to see all of the new things they decided to rewrite since the first edition!

I encourage you to read excerpts of Gribben’s introduction, which I’ve linked to a bunch of times in the above post-turned-rant. Excerpts from Dr. Gribben’s introduction to the publication of the classic American novel he saw himself fit to revise are so jaw-dropping in their hypocrisy that it is truly hard to believe that he’s being serious. It’s too bad that he was, because, had he had his tongue in his check, Dr. Gribben’s words would constitute the sort of satire and racial commentary that Twain himself might’ve been impressed by.

The Hype Cycle Is A Red Herring...Just Ask Tolstoy

james.wiedner — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:53:45 +0000

Credit for Eedited Image of Leo Tolstoy: Sean Ludwig

Educators and everyday people alike have spent (at least) the last half of a decade in a state of ever-increasing turgidity as they speculate as to all of the amazing feats the e-reader (usually, “e-reader” means “iPad” in the popular discourse, so I might use both terms below) will achieve in the context of public education. It is almost assumed that replacing every student’s bulky, quickly-dated paper textbooks with sleek, capability-rich e-readers is an unequivocally good, nay, downright imperative educational initiative.

However...

...I (generally) hate to poop on parades, and I’d agree that there’s nothing wrong with high hopes, but it would appear as though the e-reader, culminating in the iPad, has reached the point where expectations regarding a new technology have become so enormous in both quantity and scope, that there is no possible way they could all be met.

Image Credit: Gartner's Hype Cycle Research Methodology

One way to illustrate what I mean is to turn to Gartner’s somewhat-famous Hype Cycle, an illustration of which is above, this point is an inevitable stage in the life of any truly groundbreaking technology. If we were to endeavor to locate the collective attitude of educators towards e-readers at the moment in the terms that Gartner coined in conjunction with their cycle, I’d speculate that we've arrived at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. (As an aside, I realize that the above illustration is one of a curve, rather than a cycle. But, Gartner calls it a cycle, so I guess we will, too!)

If this is the case, maybe it’s time for the discourse to return to the reasonable, which would mean that we would have to at least entertain the possibility there might be trade-offs to all of the touted advantages of moving textbooks, etc. to a digital format. At the moment, even when problems regarding moving from codex to e-reader are mentioned, the issues that are raised tend to be relatively immediate- rather than long-term- in nature. Raising larger questions regarding the practical, legal, or- God forbid- philosophical pitfalls usually elicits nothing more than a few eye rolls and dismissive comments about paranoid delusions.

Maybe these rollers-of-eyes have it right. I'll be the first to concede that I am more reluctant to trust the powers-that-be than any rational person ought to be. Still, shouldn’t we at least acknowledge that a provider of school reading materials that has the absolute logistical power to provide information would also have the absolute logistical power to withhold or even take back information from a purchaser?

In a well-known example from a few years ago that isn’t specific to the educational context, Amazon removed a book from the kindle of every individual who had purchased it, without the buyer’s knowledge, much less consent. In an instance of irony that would be funny if it wasn’t so scary, the book reclaimed by Amazon was none other than the dystopian classic “1984.” As most already know, the book is about an all-pervasive government that is able to maintain its stranglehold on society because it- and only it- has the power to provide, withhold and rewrite the official history it propagates if it decides that it’s advantageous to do so.

This example is also frighteningly ironic to the extent that “1984” is a book that has been part of public school curricula since it’s publication, despite countless attempts to keep the book off of school syllabi. In other words, Amazon was able to take away reader’s access to material with the click of a button in a way that decades of organized protest movements could never achieve. But the scariest part of Amazon’s taking was the absence of backlash from the public. The story quickly fell outside of our collective attention span; their out-of-court settlements amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist.

Why was this the case?

I don’t think the absence of public outcry regarding this sort of thing is indicative of an indifferent public. Rather, by the very nature of the digital medium, censorship and control over access to literature and other texts can be performed in a way that is more or less invisible and instantaneous.

If its degree of threat lay in its degree of insidiousness, however, the threat of having books taken off of our virtual shelves isn’t nearly as great as the threat of having the content of a books being subtly censored/altered.

Consider last year's quickly-fleeting story wherein a careful reader found that the copy of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" he had received as a gift for his Nook (Barne's and Nobel's e-reader) had been modified from the original text throughout, with instances of the word "Kindle" word having been replaced with "Nook," a brand name belonging to the company who had contracted with the e-book's publisher. Why did one of the world's largest booksellers think that it was "Ok" to secretly alter one of the pinnacles of world literature in the interest of increasing market share? Could anyone honestly have thought that no reader for the of time would ever notice a change in Tolstory's prose that produced sentences such as, "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern," and "Nook in all hearts the flame of virture?" I doubt it. But they did it anyway, operating under the belief that nobody would really do anything about it when the changes were noticed. Given the almost total absence of public outcry over the incident, it would appear as though they were correct.

If the electronic medium allowed for the “cover-to-cover” alteration of one of the most revered and frequently studied literary works of all time to go undetected (and, to my knowledge, unpunished), it’s hard to exaggerate the ease with which subtle changes could be made on a few pages in one chapter in one standardized textbook among the thousands of standardized textbooks presently in use. More troubling, it's hard to exaggerate the collective apathy such changes would be met with, if recent history is any indication. Maybe we need to bring issues considering the control, dissemination, and alteration of the books we bring into the classroom (and anywhere else, for that mater), even if doing so will burst many of our bubbles about e-readers and the like...even if that sends us into Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment. I'll take disillusionment over misinformation any day of the week.

Remediation, New Media, and “Lorem Ipsum" as Censorship of Transparency

Laura Thain — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:54:01 +0000

Image Credit: Per Erik Strandberg

“Lorem ipsum” has been recognized by publishers and graphic designers throughout the 20^th century as the industry standard text by which to mock up text layout, thanks to a small UK company called Letraset, which mass-manufactured dry transferrable lettering from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the advent of digital media and desktop publishing, the first two words of the ubiquitous sequence have become recognizable to the population at large. It appears in markup templates almost universally across publishing platforms. Templates in word processing, presentation software, and web design all bear the mark of their print forbearers. Thus, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, a scrambled copy of an excerpt from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (“of the ends of good and evil”) has entered into popular discourse as a recognizable placeholder, as Wikipedia says, “used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation…by removing the distraction of meaningful content.”

This post would like to explore lorem ipsum as an ideological concept in both print and digital media. In part, this exploration will question what it means to view text itself as visual rhetoric. How can text draw attention to or defer attention from itself as a visual object? How can conventions of representation make text, like lorem ipsum, disappear? Might we view such disappearance as a sort of censorship? If so, how can we describe the internal logic of such censorship as an ideological trend in the digital age?

Lorem ipsum corresponds to a larger concept in mass media—that of transparency and immediacy. According to Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, modern society exhibits a dual impulse regarding media representation. On the one hand, audiences demand multimodal approaches (the multiplication of medium), but they also demand hyperrealistic representation. In such hyperrealistic representations, the medium becomes transparent, delivering the message it carries with as little perceivable mediation as possible. “Our culture,” Bolter and Grusin argue, “ideally…wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” Society’s demand for “invisible” mediation leads to medium transparency and immediacy—the medium delivers an object that seems immediately present because the medium focuses attention on the object, not the delivery of that object. Virtual reality, hyperrealism in film, and reality television are all examples of immediacy because the medium’s internal logic “dictates that the medium itself should disappear,” condensing the distance between the imagined and the real.

Lorem ipsum itself represents a conundrum, because as a text, it exhibits transparent qualities. But this strategy is designed to draw attention to the medium in which it appears—the very opposite of the relationship Bolter and Grusin describe between hypermediation and immediacy in Remediation. In the case of text as a visual object, then, we must amend the terms Bolter and Grusin give us to account for text as a form of mediation. When text appears contentless, it calls attention to the medium that contains it, rather than to itself. This relationship denies text as a medium in itself, rendering it an object of visual rhetoric used to display the mediating power of the medium in which it appears.

What ideological corollaries to the concept of lorem ipsum can we identify and digital and print media? Where can we see this phenomenon replicated? One clear example is in internet advertising. As we read, we consistently “filter out” the content of advertisements using recognizable advertisement form, interpreting the object only as an “ad” without paying any attention to its content. Take, for instance, this example:

Image Credit: Screencapture from CNN.com, as captured by LT

Because audiences familiar with current modes of internet advertising have become accustomed to the disruptive ad, in most cases they feel the immediate impulse to “skip” or exit the ad. The same is true of timed advertisment—attention is more likey to be placed on the “skip ad” countdown than on the advertisement itself, even as it briefly forces itself upon the viewer.

Image Credit: Screen capture from Youtube, as captured by LT.

Streaming sites abound with a manipulation of this effect, disguising advertising with the mask of what the viewer is actually looking for. As consumers adapt to strategies implemented by ad produces and producers revise their strategies according to those adaptations, the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, and news media blur considerably. Which of these, for instance, represents the actual link to download the desired object?

What arises is a form of self-censorship. Audiences constantly filter their line of vision, giving attention to what they are looking for and ignoring or willing transparent the constant web of distraction that surrounds it. Perhaps this—the interpretation of a media object as unimportant or ignorable—has always been the most insidious form of censorship.

As Bolter and Grusin point out, the 20^th century has no monopoly on hypermediation. 18^th century print culture exhibited a mass market that demanded consumers make calculated choices about what they consumed; these choices multiplied exponentially in the 19^th century. But never before has hypermediation existed across so many media simultaneously, making a transition between self-“filter bubble”-censorship and external censorship, whether on moral, political, or ethical grounds, possible.

I would like to suggest that we can see examples of this external censorship capitalizing on established, cognition-oriented modes of self-censorship in play in multiple arenas. For example, Managing Director of the Mormon Family and Church History Department Richard Turley responded to John Krakauer's controversial investigation of violence in the Mormon faith in Under the Banner of Heaven by arguing that "...[a]lthough the book may appeal to gullible persons who rise to such bait like trout to a fly hook, serious readers who want to understand Latter-day Saints and their history need not waste their time on it." Here, Turley criticizes Krakauer's book using language that differentiates the elite, skeptical, knowledgable reader from ordinary mass-readership (for him, "gullible persons"), and, by such a logic, condemns Krakauer's text for its content by means of its medium; that is, pop journalism. In this portion of his critique, he censors by rendering the text itself irrelevent or, perhaps, invisible.

This highlights a larger trend in modern acts of censorship, broadly defined: popular culture is often degraded as not worthy of attention due to its mass appeal and ordinary audience. The most effective critiques of mass-market literature, such as the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Gray, for instance, often hang a banner above these works declaring them “unworthy of attention” rather than immoral or distasteful; the latter labels often prove to evoke more, rather than less, interest in a work, whereas declaring them “wastes of time” has a greater affect on deterring particular readers.

As literary or media scholars we tend to exhibit great skepticism toward censorship that denies audiences the ability to, to put it simply, “think for themselves.” We decry modes of censorship that oppose audience agency in negotiating semiotic systems and cultural, ethical, or moral codes. We should, then, be equally vigilant against this “lorem ipsum” censorship. It is a censorship that attempts to ascribe and emphasize medium (that popular culture is synonymous with discardable literature; that challenges which question the terms of an argument exist outside the realm of civil discourse) at the expense of content; it asks us to interpret text itself as transparent; contentless; uninteresting. Such arguments ask us to ignore “the man behind the curtain,” rather than blindly opposing him; it is these arguments that may be the most dangerous of all.

Objectifying the Office - Michelle Obama and the Spanish Magazine Controversy

Cate Blouke — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:36:38 +0000

Image Credit: cropped version of Karine Percheron-Daniels magazine cover image

Even the First Lady can't escape the objectification of black women's bodies (at home and abroad).

The Internet has had a lot to say about the Spanish magazine cover unveiled last week depicting Michelle Obama bare-breasted, swathed in an American flag. Most reactions have been vehement condemnations, accusing the artist (Karine Percheron-Daniels) of racism at worst, and poor taste at best. The image involved certainly raises a lot of questions (about race, art, censorship, and objectification), and I'll get into more detail when you see the (theoretically) Not Safe For Work images after the jump.

The image is based on a painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist titled Portrait d'une négresse, completed in 1800 and currently hanging in the Louvre. While the painting is a depiction of a slave, according to at least one art historian the portrait “may be seen as a voice of protest, however small, in the discourse over human bondage.”

Karine Percheron-Daniels, the artist responsible for the cover image, has responded to the various attacks and accusations of racism with a statement explaining her thought-process and expressing a (seemingly) sincere admiration for Mrs. Obama. And, to be fair, this image is one in a series of nude political figures including the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Princess Diana, Eva Peron, and Obama himself (among others).

It interests me that most coverage of the "story" has chosen to censor the image of Mrs. Obama while leaving the breast in the original portrait bare. This explicitly condemns Percheron-Daniels' work (as not-art) while retaining the artistic value of the original.

While much to do is being made of the artist’s choice of source painting, I’m particularly interested in the significance of the choices Percheron-Daniels made in her adaptation – particularly the shifting of the subject’s gaze.

In the original work, the woman depicted confronts the viewer directly – a much more active role than the demure, side-long glance of the Percheron-Daniels’ portrait. As such, the new image removes any agency from its subject, turning her body (and face) into an object to be gazed upon. This ties in with the Spanish magazine’s rather odd caption – that Michelle Obama’s face will be key in the upcoming election – as well as the continued American obsession with Mrs. Obama’s arms.

It also seems significant that Percheron-Daniels chose to incorporate the American flag, tying the image into nationalism. On the international stage, then, the cover portrays America as being inescapably tied to its roots in slavery, and the first lady is presented as an aesthetic object. And given the kind ofappalling headlines some coverage has indulged in, the incident is certainly disheartening – particularly if you heard NPR’s recent interview of GOP-leaning veterans in which Bobbie Lucier (of Indianapolis) complains that “It's about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady.” And one can’t help but chalk that kind of comment up to race.

Hat tip to this year's viz. editor Rachel Schneider for helping me talk through these ideas.

For Amber Waves of…Censorship?

Jay Voss — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

Please note, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Forever Amber was the best-selling book in 1940s America, selling over three million copies during the decade (Guttridge). In many ways, the scope of the work recalls Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Written by Kathleen Winsor and set in seventeenth-century England, Forever Amber is the tale of Amber St. Clare, who climbs the ranks of British society by marrying (or sometimes just sleeping with) wealthier and wealthier men. The book was subject to vehement censorship, even though (or perhaps in spite of) a market demand that surely tested the durability of the Macmillan Company’s printing operation. Interestingly enough, as part of their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit, the Harry Ransom Center is showing an Armed Services Edition of Forever Amber.

Armed Service Editions were small, pocket-sized editions of books produced for US servicemen to carry in their pockets throughout the battlefields of World War II. The Armed Service Editions represented an array of genres, from classics to popular fiction, from biographies to poetry. This only seems right. American servicemen were crossing an ocean to battle fascists intent on burning any book that did not correspond with their ideology. It’s fitting that our troops would be armed with, well…books.

(Image Credit: Wikipedia)

One can see from the cover of the America Service Editions edition, the work puports to be “CONDENSED FOR WARTIME READING.” Most, but not all, of this truncation was part of a censorship project. This censorship was surely meant to conform with the polite tastes of the period. (When the book was banned in the state of Massachusetts, the state’s attorney general cited 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, 7 abortions, and numerous descriptions of women declothing in front of men (Guttridge)). It’s hard to doubt that soldiers risking life and limb for country would have minded these passages too much. Perhaps they were just grateful for truncated entertainment, anything to take their mind off the horrors of war. But the Armed Services Edition of Forever Amber does raise some pertinent questions: Is it better for a society to censor entertainment from the get-go than publish a variety of things and burn them later? What’s the difference?

Guttridge, Peter. “Obituary: Kathleen Winsor: Author of the Racy Bestseller Forever Amber,” The Independent 29 May 2003: 20. Print.

Visualizing Censorship II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Partial Screen shot from Google Maps

How do you make a topic like censorship visible? After all, the goal of censorship is to make things, in a literal sense, invisible, un-seeable. But in a world where (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes insidiously) the visual has come to be paramount, how can you visualize censorship, see what can’t be seen? A few weeks ago, I posted about a few of the visual images highlighted by the Harry Ransom Center’s new Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit related to this topic. Inspired by Banned Books Week—it’s this week, in case you didn’t know—I want to examine some modern representations of censorship.

First up is a project originated by Chris Peterson of the National Coalition Against Censorship and Alita Edelman of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, “Mapping Censorship”. As viz.’s own Lisa Gulessarian noted last week, Google Maps has been instrumental in helping us reorganize our relationships to the real world, and the “Mapping Censorship” project—now maintained by the American Library Association (ALA)—makes visible what can seem all-too-theoretical.

The project is simple: the ALA marks the location and records the details of book ban or challenge in the US from 2007 on. A flag on a map indicates a challenge, sometimes of multiple texts. I should note that the map is incomplete: the ALA records all challenges reported, but estimates that those challenges are possibly less than a quarter of all incidents nationwide, as the majority of challenges are never reported. Nonetheless, there’s an astonishing amount of information available, as each flag will provide you with a summary of the challenge and, in some cases, take you to further resources: blog entries, letters from concerned parties, and so on. Even without that additional content, the map makes an elegant ideological point—we’re a country awash in censorship.

Image: Screenshot from Flicker

While “Mapping Censorship” makes censorship visible geographically, this banner—constructed by the staff of the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, OH—constructs its appeals ideologically. And while it’s nothing new to lay claim to the American flag in quest of public support, I can’t help but find this image impressive. The books are 99 of the 100 most-challenged books from 1990-2000 (the missing book is Daniel Cohen’s Curses, Hexes, and Spells from 1974, a fondly remembered childhood classic). There’s a certain power in being able to see the texts in question (you can find a larger version of the image here). While some of the choices are unsurprising—The Anarchist Cookbook, Madonna’s Sex—others seem idiosyncratic, at best: Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik series? Where’s Waldo?? Plus, the Banned Books Week Banner makes for a fine game of Banned Book one-upsmanship, as you can challenge your friends to find out who has read more books from the list (I come in at a solid fifty-one, if you’re interested).

The point being made by these images is that censorship can easily be dismissed, as its nature is to be invisible, to be registered, if at all, only as a gap in experience. Visual rhetoric is a powerful tool in reclaiming and making visible that practice. Those who wish to ban books understand the power of visual images and language to articulate alternative viewpoints. Those who oppose censorship need images like these to keep that struggle out in the open. While all this sounds somewhat unavoidably leftist (and, full disclosure, I am), I don't want to make it out that censorship is the result of some kind of massive government conspiracy. It's not (usually). The vast majority of books are challenged by parents (good parents, even): parents who read to their children, who encourage a love of books, parents who value how important reading is as a cultural and personal act. That's why it's all the more important that we discuss--critically and out in the open--what kinds of viewpoints we can tolerate and represent. In that debate, we discover who we are (as a person, public, and nation). These images make a good start.

Visualizing Censorship: Seals, Symbols, and the Visual Rhetoric of Vice

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Photo by Jake Ptacek

We here at viz are deeply excited about our new partnership with the Harry Ransom Center, one of the premier research libraries for the humanities in the United States. As part of that partnership, we’ve been given a tour of their current exhibitions and the chance to blog about some of the Center’s amazing holdings. You may have already had a chance to read Matthew Reilly’s meditation on their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit and Jay Voss’s post on The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition. Continuing that thread, this week I want to look more closely at two artifacts on display in the BBSC exhibit: the official seals for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

I won’t rehash the history of either institution too much—something the Center exhibit does more thoroughly and forcefully than I can do here—but I am fascinated by the differing visual appeals of each seal. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (or NYSSV--sorry there’s no less ungainly acronym) seal creates a tiny narrative. In the left portion of the seal, an official-looking jailer pushes a young man through what must be one of the thickest doors in New York, into the darkness beyond. On the other half, a well-dressed gentleman tosses books onto a blazing fire—and it’s hard not to see a self-satisfied smirk on his face. The seal is a brilliant bit of propaganda. By representing the two acts in the same space, it posits a connection. They become two sides of the same coin. Never mind, of course, that the images are discontinuous—there’s no explanation as to what the criminal has to do with the books being tossed into the fire. Once you’ve seen the image, it’s virtually impossible to unsee the connection, to separate out the different narratives on a gut level.

I should add here that the narrative inscribed on the NYSSV’s seal is far from theoretical. Though technically a private endeavor—it originated through founder Anthony Comstock’s contacts in the YMCA—the NYSSV was chartered by the New York state legislature. Its members had the legal power to raid bookstores, seize material, and make arrests. Under Comstock’s successor, John S. Sumner, the NYSSV raided dozens of bookstores, impounded untold numbers of books, and prosecuted (or attempted to prosecute) dozens of novels and magazines, ranging from Ulysses to Real Forbidden Sweets. The seal was no idle threat, but a history: real people went to prison, and real books were burned, in the name of public morality.

There’s one final irony to the NYSSV’s seal. Perhaps it’s unintentional, or perhaps it’s the “lefty” politics in me looking for evidence of some Orwellian dystopia, but I wonder: when it’s read in the standard left-to-right way of to Western readers, the seal begins with an imprisonment before it gets to the “suppression of vice” (i.e the book burning). In other words, you go first, and the books after you. It’s a warning to everyone that what you read might not even be marked out yet as dangerous. A vicious book might be defined, not by its effect on you, but by your effect on it. There's a looking-glass mentality at work here which upsets the traditional narrative of a book's influence ("vicious books make bad citizens"). Instead, the seal seems to suggest that "bad citizens read bad books;" sadly, this would not be the last time that 20th century politics would rewrite cultural narratives.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

The New England Watch and Ward Society’s seal is—let’s face it—cooler. A hand throttles the snake coiled around it beneath the legend, “Manu Fortis”—“With a strong hand.” The symbolism is startling and direct, with all the subtlety of a Mack truck. While the NYSSV felt the need to narrativize and to demonstrate the effects of vice, the Watch and Ward Society—even the name is less linear—creates an iconography of power. The snake, with all its biblical associations intact, has fangs extended, ready to strike. Only a powerful (and, needless to say, masculine) hand can protect all the innocents who undoubtedly crouch just outside the frame of the seal. And it’s worth mentioning again, that hand isn’t just holding the snake, it’s crushing it. The seal makes a brilliantly simple, if disturbingly violent, claim to power.

A kind of sister organization to the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward Society was based out of Boston, where membership was largely composed of the “Brahmin aristocracy” (membership was only available to men). Unlike the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward society had no actual legal authority to impound books or make arrests; they relied on legal protest and challenges to ban books. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that their seal is more cannily metaphorical (and perhaps a slight case of over-compensation for their legal impotence). The Watch and Ward Society was no less effective, though: the phrase “banned in Boston” has entered the lexicon thanks to their efforts.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

As the poster above demonstrates, the visual rhetoric of book censorship had to change dramatically after the Nazi Party began putting into action on a state-implemented level what had previously been only the wildest fantasy of book censors (though I personally deplore the actions of the NYSSV and the Watch and Ward Society, the calibrations of their acts are, of course, far different than those of the Nazi Party). No longer could smiling book burners be depicted on state-supported seals, and the inherent claims of the Watch and Ward Society’s seal needed to be re-evaluated in a society that had witnessed the liquidation of personal freedoms and identity on a previously unimaginable scale. Ironically, this visual image itself comes from Boston, where the Boston Public Library emerged as quiet defenders of freedom of publication.

Both Societies struggled to survive in a post-WWII society. The NYSSV changed its name to the Society to Maintain Public Decency in 1947, and quietly dissolved after the retirement of Sumner, whose charisma had kept the Society afloat through a series of legal defeats. In 1948 the new head of the Watch and Ward Society, Dwight Spaulding, redirected its focus towards gambling and other social issues. Today, after several mergers and filiations, the Society’s endowments are part of the much different Community Resources for Justice group, which works to promote prison reform and ex-convicts’ rights.

Censorship, of course, hasn’t gone away, and new media fields—film, various iterations of popular music, video games—continue, along with books, to be targeted as corrupting influences on America’s youth. The act of censorship itself, though, has largely become a local issue, which tends to hide its prevalence, except in certain high-profile cases. It seems unlikely (though not, of course, impossible) that any American group will so dramatically visualize censorship as iconically and dramatically as these two. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the obvious?

"She lived happily on this earth for seven years": Ai Weiwei's Subversive Homages

ebfrye — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

Ai has come under intense scrutiny for speaking out against the Chinese government in recent years, and a studio that took him two years to build was torn down in January. The Frontline documentary by filmmaker Alison Klayman highlights many of his subversive actions and the ways in which he uses new media, particularly Twitter, to reach a broader audience and challenge the boundaries of censorship. Ai has advocated democracy in China and supported 2010 Nobel Prize recepient Liu Xiaobo (New York Times). Liu appears in the piece.

Image credit: Screenshot, pbs.org

Weiwei was particularly critical of the government refusal to take responsibility for what many viewed as flimsy construction of government housing and school buildings in the Sichuan province. After visiting the area and documenting its appearance, Ai was quite stunned by an image of children's backpacks (below):

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

In addition to surveying local survivors to document the number of deceased children and releasing those figures online, Ai a piece that functions as both an homage to the deceased children. The enormous installation covers a significant part of the exterior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The backpacks spell out a statement made to Ai by a mother of one of the victims--"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

I don't have an extended analysis to offer for any of these images, but I am struck by the potential of documentary image (and Ai's extensive record-keeping) both as a communicator of pathos and as essential to artistic process. Also worth noting is the ability of the everyday object, particularly in our commodity-driven cultures, to communicate when multiplied and poised in a certain context. Ai is often called the Chinese Andy Warhol, but his multiplication of a mass-produced item, here a backpack, still insists on a human attachment to the mechanically made. Rather than stop at criticizing mass production or inscribing it glamorous irony, Ai Weiwei insists on its dual ability to invoke destruction on a grand scale and evoke, without fully representing, the particular.