Archive for the ‘Censorship’ Category

Opinion: Open your mind to new ideas Read a banned book – Thehour.com

By Deneeka Baker, Crystal Lopez and Hailey Roy

Some might argue that Labor Day is the only holiday in September, however, those of us who work in libraries know better. Because of all the hoopla surrounding this important 2020 election, many probably dont realize that we recently had Banned Books Week. Books are banned for a variety of reasons. Racism, violence, negativity, and point of view are a few of them, but is censorship helpful? Why ban books about controversial topics we, as a human society, are bound to experience at least once in our lifetime? Literature helps us navigate our world by bringing light to uncomfortable and challenging topics.

This years American Library Association theme is Censorship is a dead end. Find your freedom to read. We with all of the turmoil presently in our country, we encourage you to read a banned book to open your mind to new ideas even if you dont agree with them. Books on the banned list include:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie;

Bone (series) by Jeff Smith;

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger;

Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey;

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood;

Internet Girls (series) by Lauren Myracle;

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee;

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou;

Its a Book by Lane Smith;

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck;

Skippyjon Jones by Judith Byron;

So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins.

Google the Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010 - 2019.

In some cases, one of us thinks the temporary banning of books is appropriate. Parents may restrict their underage children from reading explicit content. In most cases, we all agree that we must educate ourselves through the power of books to prevent ignorance and one-dimensional views.

The 1982 court case of Island Trees School District v. Pico stemmed from a parent group complaint that the school board was too lenient with its library book policies. The school removed the books by authors Langston Hughes, Kurt Vonnegut and more. Students challenged this decision all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled, on First Amendment grounds, that school officials were not allowed to ban books in libraries because of subject material. Banned Books Week began in the 1980s, but, unfortunately, books are still being banned today.

Deneeka Baker, is Library Assistant/College Student; Crystal Lopez, is Library Assistant/College Student; and Hailey Roy is Shelver/High School Student at the SONO branch of the Norwalk Public Library.

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Opinion: Open your mind to new ideas Read a banned book - Thehour.com

Blatant censorship: Retrospective of American painter Philip Guston delayed four years – WSWS

The decision by four major art museums in the UK and US to postpone for four years Philip Guston Now, a long-planned retrospective of one of postwar Americas most significant artists, is a cowardly act of censorship.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Tate Modern in London, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston claimed in a September 21 statement that Gustons obviously hostile and darkly satirical images of Ku Klux Klansmen and others could not be exhibited until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Gustons work can be more clearly interpreted.

The museums directors said they needed more time to properly prepare the public to understand Gustons message through outreach and programming. This is evasive and duplicitous. No honest opponent of racism and anti-Semitism would object to Gustons attack on the KKK and other reactionary features of American society. Those who object to the artists supposed appropriation of African American suffering are cultural-nationalist elements who insist that race is the category that defines human beings.

The directors may share this foul view or simply feel the need to accommodate themselves to the current atmosphere. In either case, they have helped deliver a blow to artistic freedom.

In the face of a deluge of criticism, the directors of the National Gallery and the Tate have tried to defend themselves. National Gallery Director Kaywin Feldman told Hyperallergic this week that in todays Americabecause Guston appropriated images of Black traumathe show needs to be about more than Guston. She went on, Also, related, an exhibition with such strong commentary on race cannot be done by all-white curators. Everybody involved in this project is white. ... We definitely need some curators of color working on the project with us. I think all four museums agree with that statement.

This is simply disgusting, a craven giving in to racialist thinking of the most sinister type, which historically has been associated with the far right. Along those lines, those who object or might object to the Guston exhibition are now generally vociferous in their calls for censorship. These are the same political forces who in 2017 protested against the exhibitionat the Whitney Museum in New Yorkof Dana Shutzs Open Casket, a painting based on a photograph of 15-year-old Emmett Till, a black youth murdered and mutilated in 1955. Some of the protesters, in fact, went so far as to demand the painting be burned!

To paraphrase what we said in 2017, the subject matter, the activities of the Klan, does not belong to African American artists or anyone else. It is the common property and responsibility of those who oppose, in Lenins phrase, all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse. These petty-bourgeois nationalist elements are not genuinely concerned with the history of African American suffering or anyone elses. If they were, they would want it to be exposed and denounced as widely as possible. They are objecting to anyone else, as they see it, gaining some advantage from the franchise.

These are selfish, careerist elements who want to monopolize a field for their own prestige and profit. At the same time, the extreme racialism serves the political purpose, pursued by the New York Times and the Democratic Party milieu, of attempting to confuse the population and divide it along racial and ethnic lines, diverting from the struggle against social inequality, war and the threat of dictatorship.

In the past three years, the situation has only become more noxious and the racialists activities more provocative.

The museum directors announcement of the postponement was met with dismay by art critics who objected to the overt act of censorship, especially against an artist deeply committed to the struggle against racism, although most seemed resigned to the delay. The artists daughter, Musa Mayer, commented, Its sad. This should be a time of reckoning, of dialogue. These paintings meet the moment we are in today. The danger is not in looking at Philip Gustons work but in looking away.

A forceful demand that the show be reinstated was issued in an open letter signed by 100 artists, curators, art dealers and writers published last Wednesday in the Brooklyn Rail, which has since garnered hundreds more signatures. Signed by Matthew Barney, Nicole Eisenman, Joan Jonas, Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor among others, the list reads like a whos who of todays most prominent artists, black and white.

The open letter begins by noting that the undersigned artists were shocked and disappointed by the four-year postponement. The letter cites the comment by Musa Mayer that Guston had dared to unveil [the] racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood, when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles. As poor Jewish immigrants, his family fled extermination in the Ukraine. He understood what hatred was. It was the subject of his earliest works.

The open letter and the principled opposition of many artists to the museums censorship are welcome and objectively significant, although the signatories weaken their own position by giving in too much to the notion of white culpability and other nostrums of identity politics.

The open letter is strongest in denouncing the notion that hiding Gustons art will somehow improve matters. The people who run our great institutions do not want trouble, it argues. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience. If museum officials feel that the current social eruptions will blow over in four years, the letter asserts, they are mistaken. The tremors shaking us all will never end until justice and equity are installed. Hiding away images of the KKK will not serve that end. Quite the opposite. And Gustons paintings insist that justice has never yet been achieved.

The artists letter demands the exhibition be restored to the museums schedules, and that their staffs prepare themselves to engage with a public that might well be curious about why a painterever self-critical and a standard-bearer for freedomwas compelled to use such imagery.

Guston (1913-1980) was born in Montreal to Ukrainian-Jewish parents but grew up in California and attended high school in Los Angeles with fellow future painter Jackson Pollock. Moving to New York, according to ArtNet, Guston was enrolled in the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s [like Pollock], where he produced works inspired by the Mexican Muralists and Italian Renaissance paintings.

Guston became associated with Abstract Expressionism, the loose gestural painting style also known as the New York School that was the dominant artistic school of the Cold War period of the 1950s. Other Abstract Expressionists were Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and, of course, Pollock.

After playing a leading role in the development of abstract art, however, Guston came to reject its approach as too rarefied and confining as a means of responding artistically and politically to the upheavals of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. What kind of man am I, he once asked, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everythingand then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?

Guston became widely known for his blunt, almost cartoonish images suggesting the thuggish brutality and political corruption of official American society. He developed a distinctive figurative style populated with oversized heads, hands, bricks, shoes and other bizarre objects. The artists highly personal iconography also included hooded Klansmen, who began appearing in his work as early as the 1930s. These buffoonish figures often appear crammed into cars like the Three Stooges, if anything more menacing because they seem so omnipresent and ordinary.

Attracted as a teenager to left-wing politics, Guston (then Goldstein) had joined one of the John Reed clubs sponsored by the Communist Party. While the role of the Stalinists was already a negative one, these clubs still attracted artists seeking to fight poverty and inequality. He and his friend Reuben Kadish painted a mural and joined a rally in Los Angeles to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.

After the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) backed off the case over fears of repercussions, the youths defense was taken up by the Communist Party. This won the CP broad support among radicalized white and black workers, as well as artists and young people like Guston. The painter, like many artists of his generation, eventually left the Stalinist orbit of the CP in favor of left-liberal politics. However, his commitment to fighting racism and anti-Semitism retained a genuine, democratic character at odds with the current racialist trends.

Often cloaked in left-sounding rhetoric by groups of political activist/artistic collectives who call for increasing the number of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) on museum staffs, boards and among the artists whose work is acquired and promoted, the identity politics campaigns against the systemic racism of cultural institutions have nothing progressive about them.

In response, the various institutions have endlessly adapted themselves to and retreated before their racialist critics. In mid-September, the Brooklyn Museumno doubt in straitened circumstances because of the pandemic-induced closureannounced it would auction 12 works from its collection to raise funds for the care of its collection.

While culling work by 16th-19th century European painters Cranach the Elder, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the Brooklyn Museum has said that it would not sell any of its work by living, presumably more ethnically diverse artists. The Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for their part recently made a point of selling work to acquire more art by women and artists of color.

In another manifestation of the logic of segregation to which this sort of outlook leads, the blue-chip Chelsea gallery and art dealer David Zwirner recently announced it was hiring Ebony L. Haynes as a new gallery director to realize her vision for a kunsthalle with an all-Black staff, which would offer exhibits of and internships to exclusively Black youth. There arent enough places of accessespecially in commercial galleriesfor Black staff and for people of color to gain experience, she said.

But what would access on this backward, racially exclusive basis amount to? What sort of art will come out of such a process?

The rotten character of this resurgence of racial-ethnic thinking finds expression in the censorship of the Guston exhibition itself. A show dedicated to the work of an artist who fiercely pursued equality and an end to oppression of all types has run afoul of a privileged, upper middle class crowd whose outlook and activity operate in a very different direction: toward racial-ethnic exclusivism, selfishness and the striving for privilege.

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Blatant censorship: Retrospective of American painter Philip Guston delayed four years - WSWS

Shakespeare is under threat from campus censors and Twitter mobs – Telegraph.co.uk

Perhaps those who carp on about the badness of the Bard should be reminded that he was no stranger to offence. Dont you know I am Richard? hissed Elizabeth I after watching Richard II and finding the Plantagenet kings deposition too close to her own experience with the Essex rebellion. One should also point out that sometimes Shakespeare issued his own trigger warnings through his Prologue (the start of Romeo and Juliet with its talk of death-markd love is the ultimate spoiler), as if he knew that controversies were important as long as you didnt offend too much.

But it is not just universities which are proving to be a barrier to Shakespeare. The insular, sometimes toxic world of the theatre Twitterati has become a breeding ground for those who shout the loudest to effectively cancel him. The result is that it sometimes feels as if the default status is to tackle him as if he is a bad thing. Take the Globe, set up by the great Sam Wanamaker, to increase our understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare. The Globe (when fully functioning) should be a joyous celebration of his work, but there is a danger that it is very much becoming a place where the craft of production is playing second fiddle to ideology; where a recent production of Richard II became a statement about post-Empire attitudes as we left the European Union.

If Shakespeare is, professionally speaking, put in the hands of ideologues, where that will leave some of the greatest theatre practitioners of our age? Robert Ickes Hamlet (first staged at the Almeida in 2017) was one of the best I have ever seen. It was a modern production, with some bold directorial innovations which werent to everyones taste, but it was also expert in highlighting the universality of the plays themes, of action, revenge, honour and death.

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Shakespeare is under threat from campus censors and Twitter mobs - Telegraph.co.uk

The move to keep podcasting free of censorship – Reclaim The Net

Compared to the necessity of creators to have access to expensive physical infrastructure, not to mention publishing power structures needed to negotiate to get their product out on TV or radio its clear where the core strength and appeal of podcasting lies.

Its the last, but a pretty solid mass medium standing democratic in the way its available to everyone, cheap to produce and consume, and discoverable with minimum effort and investment in terms of equipment and service fees.

If you have an internet connection and basic recording equipment, can cover bandwidth costs, and know how to use RSS as a content distribution tool that is pretty much all you need to be podcasting to everyone.

Nevertheless, to be able to reach a wider audience, its necessary to be discoverable in podcasting and/or streaming apps, that allow their users to search podcasts listed by dedicated directories.

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Using a free and open source podcasting app will provide you with several diverse podcast directories to choose from: the overpowering and omnipresent one maintained by Apple, and then some David(s) to this Goliath, like open source gPodder and Fyyd.

Three choices, particularly with one obviously disproportionately dominant as far as normal users and podcasters are concerned, doesnt seem like much; but its still better than just one, controlled by an entity beholden to nothing but itself like Apple, or others very similar to it like Google and Spotify.

So whats wrong with that? Dont Apple and its giant co-conspirator tech brethren already index everything published on the planet anyway? Well, the reliability and future viability of this model is now doubted and challenged by podfather Adam Curry and developer Dave Jones, who are throwing their weight behind a new open directory thats available to developers who wish to include it in their podcast apps.

Its called simply, Podcast Index. The goal is to provide an alternative to Apples dominant index that Curry suspects is now being tinkered with as opposed to the goal of Podcast Index to uphold some podcast pioneer standards of universal availability, for free, and for any use.

The main concern around Apple is that its a very centralized private entity () controlling pretty much what everybody considers the default yellow pages for podcasting while the solution is to offer an alternative as an open project to preserve podcasting as a platform for free speech.

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The move to keep podcasting free of censorship - Reclaim The Net

Apple complies with Censors in China and removes two RSS Feeds from their iOS App Store – Patently Apple

It's reported today in Hong Kong that more RSS apps are disappearing from Apples App Store in China in a new crackdown on feed readers. Apple removed two additional apps that pull content from RSS feeds, allowing Chinese users to access articles that might normally be blocked by the countrys Great Firewall.

Fiery Feeds and Reeder both acknowledged on Twitter that their iOS apps had been removed in the country. They cited a 2017 tweet by Inoreader, another popular RSS service, which posted a letter from Apple saying its app was removed in China because it included content that is illegal in the country. Inoreader said the entire service was blocked in April this year.

Apple has been repeatedly criticized for capitulating to the Chinese government by complying with censorship requests. The company has removed VPN apps, which let users bypass the Great Firewall, and news apps that include The New York Times and Quartz . Apple also removed a map app in Hong Kong that tracked protest activities. For more on this read Hong Kong's Abacus report.

However, Apple's CEO is on record stating that Apple will comply with the law of the land where they do business. This was repeated again in a February 2020 report which stated "Apple said in its statement that free expression 'is central to our company and its success' but that it is obliged to 'comply with local laws and to protect the safety of our customers and employees'", including by removing apps.

Removing apps and complying with governments is the cost of doing business in certain countries. In context, President Trump is now beginning a tech war with China, and while the ban of WeChat and TikTok apps is still in the courts, more than likely the ban will eventually go into action with Apple and Google removing the apps from their respective app stores.

Where it gets trickier is when a country like Russia demanded that Apple change their Maps app, like in the case of Crimea in 2019 where Apple complied. There are 114 UN members that don't support Russia's position on Crimea including the United States.

Choosing to support Russia's position on their Maps App as simply a cost of doing business in Russia, to many, crosses the line and shouldn't be a part of Apple's so-called "values."

Additionally, the group called "+SumOfUs.org" pressed Apple at this year's shareholder meeting. Their issue is not knowing what Apple's position is on the slave labor situation in China regarding Uighur people. If it's the law of the land for Apple to close their eyes to Apple's Chinese manufacturers using Uighur slave labor, will Apple look the other way and allow it to happen as a cost of doing business? That's when compliance with the "laws of the land" would dangerously cross the line. Unfortunately, trying to prove this situation is close to impossible being that the U.S. press is severely suppressed in China.

At the end of the day, while we hope that +SumOfUs.org will continue to press Apple on this and other related human right issues the news of removing a few RSS feed apps from the App Store isn't seen as a major issue.

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Apple complies with Censors in China and removes two RSS Feeds from their iOS App Store - Patently Apple