Culture Wars: Power, Censorship, Freedom

 Term 2

Week	Date	Time	Room	Lecturer	Department	Title
2	19-Jan-26	11am-12pm	MS.05 (Zeeman Building)	David Fletcher	History	Censorship and self-censorship in Restoration drama
3	27-Jan-26 (Tuesday lecture)	12-1pm	S0.10 (Social Studies)	Stefan Halikowski	History	Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski: The greatest Polish writer of ‘camp literature’, his lifelong censorship, and redemption in the eyes of the Citizenship Act
4	02-Feb-26	11am-12pm	B2.02 (Science Concourse)	Angela McShane	History	Patterns of Repression: Silencing the Protest Song 1600-2020
4	03-Feb-26 (Tuesday lecture)	12-1pm	S0.10 (Social Studies)	J.E. Smyth	History	Clarisse’s Ghost: Ray Bradbury, the Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of Fahrenheit 451
5	09-Feb-26	11am-12pm	S0.21 (Social Sciences)	Michael Gardiner	English	Cancellation, the highest stage of capitalism
6	No lecture
7	23-Feb-26	11am-12pm	LIB2 (Library)	Kamila Kocialkowska	History of Art	Dot, dot, dot: Censorship and Ellipsis in Russian Literature
8	02-Mar-26	11am-12pm	LIB 2 (Library)	Paulo de Medeiros	English	Desire, Law, Fascism: ‘The New Portuguese Letters’
9	11-Mar-26 (Wednesday lecture)	1-2pm	FAB0.08	Daniel Katz	English	Louis Aragon’s “Front Rouge”: Revolution between Accident and Occasion
10	16-Mar-26	11am-12pm	OC1.01	Stephen Connelly	Law	Plato and the Prohibition of Lamentation

A few years ago, I found out quite by chance that Ray Bradbury’s close friend in Hollywood was a prominent screenwriter and labour leader who was blacklisted along with many other colleagues. Her daughter was a model for Fahrenheit 451’s Clarisse. Bradbury remained an interested if peripheral observer of the political disintegration of the mid-century American film industry. Although Fahrenheit 451 has been censored over the years, this talk would explore a more insidious form of censorship in cultural life, something more than post-publication bans or expurgations: the quiet but systematic political erasure of writers by agents, publishers, film producers, and executives.

This title plays on E.P. Thompson’s description of ‘Exterminism, the Highest Stage of Civilization’, and describes how although the cancellations characterising the late 2010s and early 2020s seemed to come from a progressive left, they needed a precarious middle class co-opted into reducing difference to value extraction. ‘Cancellation’ describes an algorithmic elite asset-stripping of populations, but is concrete in another two ways. Firstly, as cancellation kicks in and the political narrows, longterm thinking is virtuously shadow-banned; a massive nuclear rearming around 2020 had little cultural registration, and was effectively normalised. This is Thompson’s exterminism, a deterrent condition for which populations themselves have become extraneous, and the population itself ‘cancelled’ (Elaine Scarry). Aerospace and infotech concerns increasingly cross-invest and conglomerate; public shaming is used to enforce a history-killing algorithmic siloing. Secondly, cancellation might mark a ‘highest’ stage in that classical capitalism has partially collapsed into a solid-state or neofeudal condition (Varoufakis, Wark, Durant, Dean), breaking the promised bind of profit and progress. The paper touches on theorists including McKenzie Wark, François Bonnet, Byung-Chul Han, Thomas Moynihan, Drew Milne, Nishitani Keiji, and Benoît Pelopidas.

In 1914, the Georgian poet, Vladimir Maiakovskii lamented that the ‘censors blew threw’ his latest book and that ‘six pages appeared reduced to dots’. The poet had fallen victim to a common strategy in nineteenth and twentieth-century literary censorship: the practice of replacing banned content with rows of printed dots. And yet, even as Maiakovskii despaired of having his poetry censored, he nonetheless, later began incorporating similar effects into his own poetic stanzas. This lecture explores the trend of ellipses in Futurist books, which were often illustrated with pinpoints incorporated into the text as perforated line breaks. It reads this device in comparison to the use of censorial ellipsis throughout the Russian literary canon, noting how numerous classic works, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, reached their readers with lines of prose reduced to dots. This lecture questions how censorial strategies were simultaneously evaded and imitated by the creative vanguard and how early twentieth-century readerships were primed to encounter signs of omission in everyday texts.

‘The New Portuguese Letters’ published in 1972 was a revolutionary text that became a hallmark of feminist theory. It led to the prosecution for pornography and moral indecency, of the three women who had written it as a collective project. It exposed the profound rot at the core of the Portuguese fascist regime and the extreme violence, both subterranean and visible, that shaped a whole society. Although it marked an era, the questions it raises on oppression, censorship, the need for poetic expression, and freedom are not only still vital but have come more and more to the fore with the rise of authoritarianism and neofascism everywhere.

Discusses Aragon’s poem, “Front Rouge” of 1931, the publication of which led to criminal charges being filed against him. I analyse André Breton’s defence of Aragon in several texts in what amounts to a proclamation of the right to completely free expression in the arts, and why many writers and artists, including Aragon himself, rejected Breton’s logic. Through this optic, I examine certain recurring questions and problems pertaining to “political” literature, as well as the deeper conceptual issues that inevitably arise in any attempt to police the expression of ideas.

The ‘fall of city’ lament is a cultural output with its origins in the oldest Mesopotamian cultures, and which spreads throughout the ancient Near East, reaching Anatolia where it is encountered by the Greeks. Here, at the birth of western legal philosophy, Plato argues repeatedly for the prohibition of lamenting. His fixation of censoring the practice is echoed beyond Athens, in Cicero and Philo Judaeus, and through time, being still the subject of commentary by Proclus. So what is it about lamentation poetry and song that Plato finds so abhorrent? What threat to the polis, law and philosophy does he see in lamenting lost cities?