California Officials Defend Right to Read Banned Books

The last several months of the Trump administration’s reign have seen the deployment of language restriction as a tactic in the systemic erosion of civil rights. While the scale has intensified dramatically, this enforcement of social hegemony through literary and aesthetic regulation is not a new phenomenon. Historian Andrew Hartman contends that “the history of America, for better and worse, is largely a history of debates about the idea of America.” We are watching this ideological question play out violently, attempting to delineate which bodies are “American,” what behavior is “American,” and what art, what literature, what television is “American.” One of the many ways this debate is performed is through grand displays of moral outrage over literature, as well as through the bann