Text and books censorship: different contexts, ways of censoring, and resisting

Abstract

The article analyzes censorship, problematizing its nature, legal and semantic unfoldings, and how different meanings of censorship were operationalized in material and symbolic actions. The work dialogues with other studies, such as those from Robert Darnton, who discussed the complexity of defining censorship and an ethnography of censorship during the Bourbon’s France (18th century), British India under colonization (19th and early 20th centuries), and communist East Germany during the Cold War (20th century). Furthermore, it dialogues with investigations in Brazil conducted by Abreu (2003) about the censor court in Colonial
Brazil and by Paiva (1996), who investigated the Catholic censorship of novels in the early 20th century. For a current analysis, the article discusses newspaper articles about the censorship theme, indicating cultural and social phenomena that lead to the “burn” of contemporary works and indicates some new ways of control in digital society. The study concludes that censorship is contradictory, representing interests and regimes of truth, though, at the same time, existing legal and cultural ways of resisting its effects. Hence, the interests of censors or regimes confront readers themselves, the diversity of ways to disseminate texts, the world of editors, and the different systems of truth.