‘Censorship’ has become a fashionable topic, not only because of newly available archival material from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but also because the ‘new censorship’ (inspired by the works of Foucault and Bourdieu) has widened the very concept of censorhip beyond its conventional boundaries. This volume uses these new materials and perspectives to address the relationship of censorship to cultural selection processes (such as canon formation), economic forces, social exclusion, professional marginalization, silencing through specialized discourses, communicative norms, and other forms of control and regulation. Two articles in this collection investigate these issue theoretically. The remaining eight contributions address the issues by investigating censorial practice across time and space by looking at the closure of Paul’s playhouse in 1606; the legacy of 19th century American regulations and representation of women teachers; the relationship between official and samizdat publishing in Communist Poland; the ban on Gegenwartsfilme (films about contemporary society) in East Germany in 1965/66; the censorship of modernist music in Weimar and Nazi Germany; the GDR’s censorship of jazz and avantgarde music in the early 1950s; Aesopian strategies of textual resistance in the pop music of apartheid South Africa and in the stories of Mario Benedetti.

A bestselling art historian and a free speech advocate explore subtle new forms of censorship in the art world and beyond. ""In private, museum people have told me that self-censorship is indeed the order of the day. But it is quite rare for an official to speak about it in public. Self-censorship occurs behind closed doors. There are practically no whistle-blowers.""--Hans Haacke, conceptual artist known for his socially and politically engaged art If your idea of censorship is an anonymous bureaucrat in a government office exercising prudish control over "offensive" art and speech, wake up and smell the conglomeration. Censorship today is just as likely to be the result of a market force or a bandwidth monopoly as a line edit or the covering of a nude sculpture, and the current system of new technologies and economic arrangements has subtle, built-in mechanisms for suppressing free expression as powerful as any known in other centuries. In "Censoring Culture," the nationally known author of the ArtSpeak books and the head of the National Coalition Against Censorship's Arts Program bring together the latest thinking from art historians, cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as first-person accounts by artists and advocates, to give us a comprehensive understanding of censorship in a new century. Contributors include: - J.M. Coetzee, Judy Blume, and others on self-censorship - Hans Haacke on the marriage of art and money - DeeDee Halleck on the military-media-industrial complex - Marjorie Heins on violence and children - Randall Kennedy on the risks of regulating hate speech - Lawrence Lessig on creativity and copyright inthe electronic age - Judith Levine on shielding children from sex - Diane Ravitch on sensitivity guidelines for national testing - Douglas Thomas on hackers and hacking culture

An examination of how the media is under fire and how to safeguard journalists and the information they seek to share with the public. Journalists are being imprisoned and killed in record numbers. Online surveillance is annihilating privacy, and the Internet can be brought under government control at any time. Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, warns that we can no longer assume that our global information ecosystem is stable, protected, and robust. Journalists are increasingly vulnerable to attack by authoritarian governments, militants, criminals, and terrorists, who all seek to use technology, political pressure, and violence to set the global information agenda. Reporting from Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and Mexico, among other hotspots, Simon finds journalists under threat from all sides. The result is a growing crisis in information—a shortage of the news we need to make sense of our globalized world and fight human rights abuses, manage conflict, and promote accountability. Drawing on his experience defending journalists on the front lines, he calls on “global citizens,” U.S. policy makers, international law advocates, and human rights groups to create a global freedom-of-expression agenda tied to trade, climate, and other major negotiations. He proposes ten key priorities, including combating the murder of journalists, ending censorship, and developing a global free-expression charter to challenge the criminal and corrupt forces that seek to manipulate the world's news. “Wise and insightful. [Simon] offers hope to all who care about maintaining the free flow of information in a world full of would-be censors.”—Ann Cooper, Columbia Journalism School

Censorship was once a predictable topic, dividing liberals and conservatives down the middle on issues like obscenity and national security. Today, the debate over the regulation of speech offers no such easy dichotomy, with feminists joining forces with religious fundamentalists to control pornography, and abortion rights advocates seeking to restrict clinic demonstrations while prolife groups defend their freedom to picket. Underlying this trend is a fundamental intellectual shift--exemplified by the work of Michel Foucault--that holds that the state is not the only agent of censorship. The thirteen contributors here explore the topic of censorship from the viewpoint of numerous disciplines and viewpoints.

'Censorship in South Asia' explores the cultural politics behind the debate, from colonial paintings to onscreen kisses and nuclear secrets.

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.

A fascinating examination of how restricting speech has continuously shaped our culture, and how censorship is used as a tool to prop up authorities and maintain class and gender disparities Through compelling narrative, historian Eric Berkowitz reveals how drastically censorship has shaped our modern society. More than just a history of censorship, Dangerous Ideas illuminates the power of restricting speech; how it has defined states, ideas, and culture; and (despite how each of us would like to believe otherwise) how it is something we all participate in. This engaging cultural history of censorship and thought suppression throughout the ages takes readers from the first Chinese emperor’s wholesale elimination of books, to Henry VIII’s decree of death for anyone who “imagined” his demise, and on to the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the volatile politics surrounding censorship of social media. Highlighting the base impulses driving many famous acts of suppression, Berkowitz demonstrates the fragility of power and how every individual can act as both the suppressor and the suppressed.