The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the full series here.
Samuel Cohen is the editor of the essay anthology Banning Books in America: Not a How-To. He sat down with KBIA's Robin Crouch to discuss book banning and the power of words. Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
Robin Crouch: You talk in your intro to the book about how the mass firings and deportations going on are really scary, but Americans should also be just as concerned about quieter encroachments on freedom, such as legislation and school boards limiting expression. Can you talk more about the dangers of these kinds of limitations?
Samuel Cohen: The freedom of expression is the First Amendment for a reason. It's fundamental to a system in which the people are supposed to be the rulers, right? And we have people in charge, in lots of parts of government in the U.S., who don't respect that principle and don't seem devoted to it. So it's a scary time. I specialize in 20th and 21st century American fiction and have taught courses on the Cold War, and this is worse than that.
Crouch: In your research and experience, what exactly is it that causes someone to want to ban a book? What's the thought process and psychology behind what's happening?
Cohen: That's hard to answer, because I think there are different motivations and different situations. I do try to remember that there are people wanting to keep books away from their children working from good faith. They just think, "I don't want my kids reading about sex," or "I don't want my kids hearing bad things about America." I disagree with both of those reasons, right? I think you can’t study the history of a country if you’re not gonna be honest about it.
But there are a lot more people who are operating from really unfortunate motives. There are people who are proud not to have read books when they go before school boards. They say, "I'm not going to read that trash." And it's because it's by and about Black people, or it's by and about LGBTQ+ people, and they just are anti those things.
Crouch: In chapter 11, Amardeep Singh quotes Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech, saying, "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge."
On the flip side of this, is there language that is healing, that expands knowledge? What is, in your opinion, the power of words?
Cohen: I think words, imaginative literary words [and] works, can show us what it's like to be another person, as well as what it's like to live in a world that's different from our own, right? You know, people go back and forth on this all the time, and they say one of the things that's most valuable about literature is that it teaches you values and ethics and teaches you to be a good person.
And then somebody always says, "But Hitler read literature," right? I think that's a facile argument against this potential. And I think the potential lies in the ability to imagine, right? I think empathy is all about imagination. So if I am able to put myself in somebody else's shoes because I read a book that does that, I can then empathize with them. I can then see what their situation in the world is, and if I care, I can then try to act in a way that makes it better.
