Censorship
Books stopped by authority. The Index of Forbidden Books, obscenity trials from Ulysses to Lady Chatterley, samizdat typed on onionskin, the fatwa against Rushdie, and state censors from Franco's Spain to the present.
Part of Books
60 moments in this segment.
- - Cathalogus librorum qui prohibentur. Portada del libro Cathalogus librorum qui prohibentur mandato Illustrissimi & Reverend.[issimi] D.[omini] D.[omini] Ferdinandi de Valdes Hispalen.[sis] Archiepi.[scopi], Inquisitoris Generalis Hispaniae (Pinciae: Sebastianus Martinez excudebat, MDCLIX) [Valladolid, 1559]
- - Martin droeswoode-index librorum prohibitorum-1640. Alegoría de la Inquisición, frontispicio del Novisissimus librorum prohibitorum et expurgandorum index, Madrid, por Diego Díaz, 1640
- - Titelkupfer Index librorum prohibitorum. Titelkupfer zum Index librorum prohibitorum von 1711
- - Index librorum prohibitorum Benedicti XIV 1758. Frontispicium. Frontispicio de la edición de 1758 del Index (Index librorum prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri Benedicti XIV Pontificis Maximi jussu recognitus. Romae: Ex typographia Rev. Camerae Apostolicae. Grabado de «Gioan Fabri» (Giovanni Fabbri?-1777).
- - Henry Spencer Ashbee - Index Librorum Prohibitorum 3 - Catena Librorum Tacendorum. Title page of Henry Spencer Ashbee: Index Librorum Prohibitorum 3 - Catena Librorum Tacendorum
- - Sylvia Beach on publishing Ulysses. A short archival clip in which Beach describes taking on publication of Joyce's novel when others would not.
- - Salman Rushdie interviewed about The Satanic Verses. A 1989 Dutch television interview with Rushdie about the novel and the reaction to it.
- - Christopher Hitchens on Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. A C-SPAN discussion recorded days after the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie over his novel.
- - Is censorship the mother of creativity in China?. Al Jazeera asks Chinese writers and artists how they work within, and around, official restrictions.
- - The legacy of Joyce's Ulysses. A Library of Congress discussion of the novel, including its suppression and the trial that ended it.
- - The Most Dangerous Book: the battle for Ulysses. Kevin Birmingham discusses his history of the writing, publication, suppression and legal vindication of Joyce's novel.
- - A signed first edition of Ulysses. An antiquarian bookseller examines one of the 100 signed copies of the 1922 Shakespeare and Company Ulysses.
- - Is Cuban art inhibited by censorship?. PBS asks Cuban artists and writers whether state oversight limits what they produce.
- - Myanmar ends direct media censorship. An AP report on the 2012 dismantling of Myanmar's pre-publication censorship board, with journalists' reactions.
- - Czechoslovakia and Charter 77. A lecture on Charter 77 and the typewritten circulation of dissident texts in Czechoslovakia.
- - Mao's Little Red Book, thrown across the Commons. Newsnight report occasioned by a copy being brandished in Parliament, on Quotations from Chairman Mao, printed in the hundreds of millions from 1964 and among the most-produced books in history.
- - George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The British Library examines Orwell's novel, its composition and its 1949 publication.
- - Censorship case studies from Vietnam. A conversation examining specific instances of censorship in Vietnamese cultural production.
- - Working under Iranian censorship. France 24 interviews an Iranian director about producing work within the approval system.
- - The Rushdie fatwa, thirty years on. BBC Newsnight revisits the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and its lasting effect on publishing.
- - The propaganda films of apartheid South Africa. Al Jazeera's Listening Post on the state's own media output alongside its suppression of others.
- - State censorship in Ireland after 1930. Historian Aoife Bhreatnach on how the Irish censorship of publications system actually operated.
- - The Stasi and the Berlin Wall. DW's documentary on the East German security apparatus, including its control of what could be written and read.
- - A lawsuit over Oklahoma's book restrictions. A local news report on litigation challenging a state law restricting classroom books.
- - A century after Ulysses was published. A library panel on what followed the 1922 publication, including the obscenity litigation and the book's influence.
- - Ulysses: the first hundred years. An academic panel marking the centenary of the novel's 1922 publication and its long afterlife.
- - Resistance and literature in Myanmar. A Yale panel on writers who published under Burmese military censorship and what publishing costs them.
- - Fake news in the eighteenth century. A British Library curator presents printed misinformation from the eighteenth century and how authorities responded.
- - The Ulysses obscenity case. A history programme on the 1933 case and the judge whose decision redefined literary obscenity.
- - The interview Salman Rushdie came to regret. Archive footage of Rushdie discussing religion and the fallout from The Satanic Verses.
- - Book restrictions pressure Indiana schools and libraries. PBS NewsHour reports on a state law and its effect on what school and public libraries stock.
- - The scandal that shook Britain. Tim Tate on the Spycatcher case and what the failed suppression revealed about MI5.
- - The Satanic Verses thirty years on. A BBC documentary revisiting the 1989 fatwa, the protests and the book's publication history.
- - Salman Rushdie: through a glass darkly. A BBC documentary profile of Rushdie covering the years he lived under the fatwa.
- - Why Stalin banned popular books. A survey of the literature suppressed under Stalin and the reasoning offered at the time.
- - Sending books through prison censorship. KPBS on Books Through Bars San Diego, whose volunteers ship books to incarcerated people nationwide and navigate what each facility will allow.
- - Silent resistance: Romanian film under communism. How Romanian filmmakers worked around Ceausescu-era censorship, a parallel to what writers faced.
- - Rushdie on the fatwa. Salman Rushdie speaks about the fatwa, secularism and what the affair did to publishing.
- - The Index of Forbidden Books. An account of the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum across the four centuries it was maintained.
- - Against the state information monopoly in East Germany. A lecture on the media experiments that worked around East German publishing controls.
- - Women's voices from the Myanmar revolution. PEN America hosts Myanmar writers discussing publishing under renewed military rule.
- - The Spycatcher affair. How the British government's attempt to suppress Peter Wright's MI5 memoir turned into a global publishing story.
- - Art, censorship and resistance in Cuba. An academic panel on how Cuban writers and artists negotiate official publishing channels.
- - Spain and Franco nostalgia. ARTE examines how Spain handles the memory of the dictatorship, including its cultural controls.
- - Reading South African literature against censorship. An introduction to the South African novels suppressed under apartheid and why each was banned.
- - Why the court banned the textbook. An analysis of the reasoning behind the Indian textbook restriction and the objections to it.
- - Samizdat: how Soviet citizens escaped censorship. A Cold War history documentary on the clandestine reproduction and circulation of banned texts in the USSR.
- - Television under Franco. A documentary on Spanish broadcasting under Franco, and the censorship apparatus that governed all media.
- - Censoring publications in twentieth-century Ireland. A lecture on the Irish register of prohibited publications and the reasoning recorded by its censors.
- - 150 years of the Comstock laws. A historical society panel on the Comstock Act's long afterlife in American obscenity law.
- - Can a court ban a book in India?. A legal explainer on the powers Indian courts have over publications, using the NCERT case.
- - Soviet samizdat: imagining a new society. Scholar Ann Komaromi on samizdat as a system: how texts were retyped, circulated and read in the USSR.
- - Writers underground: Soviet samizdat, 1967-1982. A history podcast on the network of typists and readers who circulated banned manuscripts in the USSR.
- - Inside the Index of Forbidden Books. A discussion of how the Index worked, who administered it and what was actually on it.
- - Creative dissent against censorship. Burmese artists and writers on the strategies they use to publish around official restrictions.
- - Lady Chatterley: scandal and courtroom. The publishing history of the novel and the arguments the defence used to win.
- - Lady Chatterley's Lover on trial. A history podcast on the trial as a political and legal event, not just a literary one.
- - Television in communist Romania. A documentary on Romanian broadcasting under Ceausescu and the censorship regime that governed all media.
- - Censoring books in schools and libraries. A Centre for Free Expression panel on what school and library censorship means for the future of reading.
- - The novel written on toilet paper in prison. On Ngugi wa Thiong'o, detained without trial in Kenya, who wrote a novel in Gikuyu on prison toilet paper.