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The Aftermath: British Theatre following the Abolition of Statutory Censorship

David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne

in Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson

This chapter investigates whether any new forms of censorship have faced the theatre since the passing of the 1968 Theatres Act. After an account of attempts to bring prosecutions against plays or ... More

This chapter investigates whether any new forms of censorship have faced the theatre since the passing of the 1968 Theatres Act. After an account of attempts to bring prosecutions against plays or theatre practitioners since 1968, it explores whether — in the view of theatre companies, theatre practitioners, and playwrights — any forms of covert censorship have replaced statutory theatre censorship since 1968. Using an empirical methodology, the chapter attempts to provide a reliable snapshot of the views of theatre professionals in 2002-2003. The final section of the chapter makes use of source material from newspapers and web pages to give an account of a new form of attempted, pressure-group censorship emerging after scenes of actual or threatened violence in Birmingham and London in 2004-2005. The chapter concludes by asking whether such direct action will lead to renewed government censorship or to new forms of cautious self-censorship.Less

Conclusion: Literary Life in Transition

Ellen Wiles

in Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition

This chapter draws together the themes and ideas from the book; situates the writers and their literary work transition by providing a contextual overview of the political, social, legal, artistic ... More

This chapter draws together the themes and ideas from the book; situates the writers and their literary work transition by providing a contextual overview of the political, social, legal, artistic and literary culture during the current phase of transition; and offers some concluding thoughts.Less

Romancing Rhetoricity and Historicity: The Representational Politics and Poetics of Little Reunion

Kam Louie (ed.)

in Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures and Genres

Focusing on Little Reunion, a key text for interpreting the series of self-fashioning performances Eileen Chang directed at Chinese reading publics as her imagined spectators, confessors, and ... More

Focusing on Little Reunion, a key text for interpreting the series of self-fashioning performances Eileen Chang directed at Chinese reading publics as her imagined spectators, confessors, and adjudicators, this chapter argues that for Chang, autobiographical fiction calls for a unique and delicate balancing act between rhetoricity and historicity, imagination and factuality. An autobiographical text is neither a simple verbal construct of indeterminable referents, nor the mechanical recording of indisputable facts, but rather a process of self-recollecting and self-enactment repeated with an inescapable difference over time. Little Reunion brings the intersubjective politics of representation into high relief. Chang's desire for self-articulation and self-fashioning contends with the inscriptional authority of her former lover Hu Lancheng. Moreover, her desire to search for her roots, and in particular to construct a group portrait of her extended family, creates tension with the traditional Confucian expectation that respectful children/descendants should speak only selectively and positively about their parents/ancestors. Complicating her bid for access to inscriptional and cultural authority is the traditional marginality of women's self-representation. As a female autobiographical subject seeking to publicly interpret herself and the significant others in her life, Chang ineluctably confronts the gender bias of reigning literary, political, and social values.Less

Autobiography and the Intellectual

Alex Belsey and Alex Belsey

in Image of a Man: The Journal of Keith Vaughan

This chapter reveals how Keith Vaughan reconfigured his wartime journal-writing as a comprehensive autobiographical project that would record his memories and experiences and transform them into a ... More

This chapter reveals how Keith Vaughan reconfigured his wartime journal-writing as a comprehensive autobiographical project that would record his memories and experiences and transform them into a creative product. Having declared a policy of full disclosure and a commitment to resist self-censorship, he embarked upon a programme of self-education, redolent of Bildung, that made his journal the record of a developing mind and that allowed him to fold influences from literature, philosophy, and modernism into his own writing. The first section of this chapter describes how Vaughan’s journal became a consciously literary autobiographical project concerned with time and memory, regarding the third volume as a distinct milestone wherein Vaughan first articulated his desire to write autobiography and began to fully recognize (and experiment with) the possibilities of life-writing. The second section focusses on Vaughan’s autodidacticism, which encompassed the reading of other life-writers and his discovery of seminal works (by such key figures as T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust) that greatly influenced him and helped him to identify, albeit precariously, with Oxbridge intellectualism. The third section confirms the enduring importance of Vaughan’s journal as a continuous autobiographical document which he could refer back to and re-evaluate during periods of duress.Less

The Battle of the Narrative: Symbols, Pronouncements, Teachers

Hillel Cohen

in Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967

One of the tasks collaborators were assigned was to pass on information about people who spoke out against the state of Israel, its leaders, or its institutions. Critical statements were recorded in ... More

One of the tasks collaborators were assigned was to pass on information about people who spoke out against the state of Israel, its leaders, or its institutions. Critical statements were recorded in the dossiers of those who made them; the police goal was to have a file on every adult Arab citizen, especially those who were criminally and politically active. In the big picture, this collection of utterances had three purposes: to keep tabs on the general mood of the Arab population, to identify individuals who might potentially take action against the state, and to establish boundaries for the permitted discourse of Arabs in Israel. From the start, the security forces took a special interest in collecting statements against collaboration and collaborators. The security forces institutionalized their surveillance of Arab speech. Self-censorship also became an established practice. In addition, they severely punished teachers who expressed opinions opposed to those of the system. This chapter examines the violent clash between two ideologies and their symbols: the Jewish state and its emblems versus Arab nationalism and its emblems.Less

Taboo language and its restriction

John E. Joseph

in Language and Politics

This discusses taboo language and its restriction. It covers swearing; the language police state; the politics of (self-)censorship; hate speech; and the right to hear no evil.

Local Heroine: The Hagiography of Cultural Trauma

Holly Gayley

in Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet

Chapter 2 examines the hagiographic portrait of Tāre Lhamo as a local heroine during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution. The representation of this period in her ... More

Chapter 2 examines the hagiographic portrait of Tāre Lhamo as a local heroine during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution. The representation of this period in her hagiography, Spiraling Vine of Faith, elides the specter of state and her own personal losses and instead narrates the period through a series of miracle tales that portray Tāre Lhamo as a tantric heroine, addressing the immediate needs of her local community. In this way, I argue that Spiraling Vine of Faith constructs a redemptive narrative amid the devastation of the Maoist period and provides a poignant means for restoring a sense of Tibetan agency in the wake of cultural trauma.Less

First Do No Harm: The James MacTaggart Lecture 2004

John Humphrys

in Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures

In this lecture, the author, a distinguished television journalist who presented BBC Radio 4's Today programme from 1987, examines two connected themes. First, bad television has become damaging, ... More

In this lecture, the author, a distinguished television journalist who presented BBC Radio 4's Today programme from 1987, examines two connected themes. First, bad television has become damaging, meretricious, seedy, cynical and harmful to society. Second, if journalists engage in self-censorship post-Hutton this will harm democracy. After watching ten tapes illustrating the ‘case for television’, the author concludes that reality TV is the culprit behind the worst television, which has become preoccupied with sex, confrontation, aggression and violent language, ‘even in the soaps’. One defence is the ‘no brow’ argument, which suggests that television programming should no longer be classified into high or low brow, but simply as ‘no brow’. The author also considers how news has fared while other television output has changed so radically. He also comments on the politics of journalism and concludes by arguing for more, not less, in-depth interviews with politicians, more investigative journalism and more ‘straightforward political analysis’.Less

The Autumn of the Patriarchs

Barry Langford

in Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945

The Hollywood film industry at the end of World War II was very lightly regulated. Yet a variety of forms of regulation played a vital role in sustaining the intricate and profitable mechanisms of ... More

The Hollywood film industry at the end of World War II was very lightly regulated. Yet a variety of forms of regulation played a vital role in sustaining the intricate and profitable mechanisms of the studio system. The most obvious and visible of these was the self-censorship of motion picture content though the industry-sponsored, arm's-length Production Code Administration (PCA), run since 1934 by Joseph Breen. The effective regulation of output through the operations of an assembly line-like system of production, distribution and exhibition was central to the business model of the Big Five studios. This chapter examines the Supreme Court decision in the 1948 case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al. — the famous ‘Paramount Decree’ — which revisited and definitively resolved the question of whether the major studios constituted a ‘trust’ in the terms of U.S. commercial law, that is, a cartel operating illegitimately to restrict market freedom in a given industry. It also discusses the rise of independent studios after Paramount and the impact of television on the film industry.Less

When Celluloid Lawyers Started to Speak: Exploring Juriscinema’s First Golden Age

Francis M Nevins

in Law and Popular Culture

This chapter talks about motion pictures made during the first golden age of juriscinema, which is during the period from the 1920s to mid-1934. Most of these films are no longer available and only a ... More

This chapter talks about motion pictures made during the first golden age of juriscinema, which is during the period from the 1920s to mid-1934. Most of these films are no longer available and only a very limited number can be found in the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) collection. This chapter reviews the film Counsellor at Law, provides an overview of the film made outside the US, and outlines the impact on juriscinema of the curtain of self-censorship that fell over Hollywood in the summer of 1934.Less

Don’t Try to Do Someone Else’s Job

Stanley Fish

in Save the World on Your Own Time

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form ... More

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their students’ character or turn them into exemplary citizens. I can’t speak for every academic, but I am not trained to do these things, although I am aware of people who are: preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, inspirational speakers. Teachers, as I have said repeatedly, teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. Of course a teacher might produce some of these effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. The question that administrators often ask, “What practices provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?” is not a bad question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college or university course. No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults, but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching. Once we cross the line that separates academic work from these other kinds, we are guilty both of practicing without a license and of defaulting on our professional responsibilities. But isn’t it our responsibility both as teachers and as citizens to instill democratic values in our students? Derek Bok thinks so and invokes studies that claim to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between a college education and an active participation in the country’s political life: “researchers have shown that college graduates are much more active civically and politically than those who have not attended college” (Our Underachieving Colleges). But this statistic proves nothing except what everyone knows: college graduates have more access to influential circles than do those without a college education. Less

‘A Man for a’ That’: Robert Burns (1759–1796)

Kenneth R. Johnston

in Unusual Suspects: Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s

Robert Burns’s general reputation does not seem to be that of a political suspect, but his legacy has been bitterly contested in political terms ever since his early death in 1796. In this respect, ... More

Robert Burns’s general reputation does not seem to be that of a political suspect, but his legacy has been bitterly contested in political terms ever since his early death in 1796. In this respect, he is a victim of Pitt’s policies of Alarm. He was dependent on local gentry and Edinburgh aristocrats, but had to hide his politics from them. His position in the Excise Office prevented him from political activity, forcing him to express his liberalism indirectly, including anonymous publication and coded language. Denounced by enemies, his political conduct was subjected to official inquiry. He was cleared, but the prospect of losing his job and facing debtors’ prison terrified him. He collected many Scottish folk songs, in which he could more freely express his opinions. He knew of Thomas Muir and the other ‘Scottish Martyrs,’ but his only poetical mention of them reveals his shame at having to keep silent.Less

The Masters: The Director-Centered Mode of Production and the Tradition of Quality

Maria Belodubrovskaya

in Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin

Chapter Three discusses the implications of the director-centered mode of film production and suggests why entrusting self-governance and self-censorship to a select group of director-masters was ... More

Chapter Three discusses the implications of the director-centered mode of film production and suggests why entrusting self-governance and self-censorship to a select group of director-masters was counterproductive. The Soviet film industry did not have producers, and only directors had the creative and technical expertise to make films. This unique expertise, which was hard to replicate, as well as their status as “engineers of human souls,” put Soviet film directors in a formidable position vis-à-vis the party-state. Moreover, most of them were not propagandists, but artists, and their professional agenda was never entirely subsumed by Stalinism.Less

Censorship: Industry Self-Censorship and Extreme Uncertainty

Maria Belodubrovskaya

in Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin

Soviet censors were also poorly equipped to guide filmmakers. Censorship was primarily carried out by the industry itself, which created conflicts of interest and contributed to risk aversion. When ... More

Soviet censors were also poorly equipped to guide filmmakers. Censorship was primarily carried out by the industry itself, which created conflicts of interest and contributed to risk aversion. When industry self-censorship proved unsuccessful, Stalin and the Central Committee apparatus intervened. Stalin’s involvement and party censorship, the outcome of which was hard to predict, introduced extreme uncertainty and lack of responsibility to the already compromised self-censorship, making it only less productive. It was not the strength of censorship, but its weaknesses that made it impossible for Soviet cinema to properly function. While industry censors multiplied, film production slowed.Less

The Winter of Discontent: Elections, Protests, and the Internet in Russia, 2011–12

Sarah Oates

in Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere

By the end of 2011, it became clear the internet had changed the political landscape in Russia as the largest street protests since 1993 were triggered by reports of election falsification. This ... More

By the end of 2011, it became clear the internet had changed the political landscape in Russia as the largest street protests since 1993 were triggered by reports of election falsification. This chapter analyzes a combination of factors that contributed to the Russian “winter of discontent”: (1) the failure of state media controls that relied on self-censorship; (2) an online sphere that was freer than traditional mass media; (3) an explosion in internet use that eroded the dominance of state-run television; (4) a lack of understanding about citizen attitudes and the online sphere on the part of the Kremlin; (5) crowd-sourcing; (6) online political networks; and (7) the role of online social entrepreneurs. In conjunction with these factors, reports of widespread electoral falsification served as a particularly emotive and powerful protest trigger for Russian citizens.Less

Industry Access

Jessica M. Fishman

in Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead

Can bad timing or insufficient access explain why photojournalism rarely bears witness to death? It becomes clear that logistical challenges are not the problem. In fact, major resources are ... More

Can bad timing or insufficient access explain why photojournalism rarely bears witness to death? It becomes clear that logistical challenges are not the problem. In fact, major resources are leveraged successfully to assure that photojournalists achieve ample and immediate access. Ironically, despite the copious resources devoted to granting photojournalists immediate access, they are often willing to turn a blind eye. The missing images reflect an editorial drive among photojournalists and their editors to conceal the corpse. The gaps in the visual record of images are an artefact of choice—an act of self-censorship.Less

Artists and Their Repertoire of Responses

Malvika Maheshwari

in Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-Taking in India

Chapter 7 turns to India’s increasingly angry and insecure but resilient art world, which suggests a range and variety of responses to such an orchestration of violence, contradicting the view of ... More

Chapter 7 turns to India’s increasingly angry and insecure but resilient art world, which suggests a range and variety of responses to such an orchestration of violence, contradicting the view of ‘artists as only victims’, as much as it is a reminder of the resilience of democracy in India. Addressing four dominant themes—artists as attackers, unity and collective action, exile and resistance, and fear and self-censorship—it is an exploration of these diverse manifestations. These categories are, of course, only illustrative and not an exhaustive commentary on the assorted ways in which free speech is both understood and modified, when it is increasingly confronted with threatening, violent behaviour.Less