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Offline models and perspectives
This
page
provides a perspective on online censorship by looking at practice
offline.
print
For those interested in censorship of
books we recommend Edward de Grazia's engagingly written - and for the
moment definitive - Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity
& the Assault on Genius (New York, Random 92).
Dr Bowdler's Legacy: A History
of Expurgated Books in England & America (Boston,
Godine 92) is Noel Perrin's account of sanitising literature from
Shakespeare and the Bible - all that horrid violence! - through to Dr
Doolittle (seething with political incorrectness).
Paul Boyer's study in Purity In
Print (New York, Scribners 68) of the US crusade against smut in the
first half of last century has aged like a fine wine. Donald
Thomas' A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary
Censorship in England (London, Routledge 69) is less
substantial. We recommend instead Censorship &
the Control of Print in England & France 1600-1910
(New Castle, Oak Knoll 92), edited by Robin Myers & Michael Harris
Peter Coleman's Obscenity,
Blasphemy & Sedition: The Rise & Fall of Literary Censorship in
Australia (Potts Point, Duffy & Snellgrove 00) is a reprint
of the entertaining 1960 study by the conservative politician. For
a view to his left we recommend The High Price Of Heaven (St
Leonards, Allen & Unwin 99) by noted Australian author David Marr
and Jay Gertzman's Bookleggers & Smuthounds: The
Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia, Uni of
Pennsylvania Press 99).
Sex, Laws & Cyberspace: Freedom
& Censorship on the Frontiers of the Online Revolution (New
York, Holt 97) by Jonathan Wallace & Mark Mangan is a readable account
of US online smut-busting in the early 1990s.
In Australia you can readily obtain
some publications in bookshops and libraries but not on the Web, because
the Internet is somehow special and - unlike broadcast tv or print -
will fade your children as well as your curtains (as daylight saving was
wont to do under former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen).
The Australian Broadcasting Authority,
now acting as online censors, for example recent issued a 'takedown'
order for a site that published the puerile Anarchists Cookbook,
readily available in libraries across Australia.
A perspective on such publications is provided by the 1997
report
by the US Department of Justice's cybercrime unit on The
Availability of Bombmaking Information.
The US Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF)
has an extensive bibliography of case law, media coverage,
academic studies and other writings from the 1930s onwards
regarding censorship of political cartoons and popular comics.
Joss Marsh's Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture & Literature
in 19th Century England (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press
98) is an academic study of UK blasphemy censorship, still
active in the early 1990s.
film
Frank Walsh's Sin and Censorship (New Haven,
Yale Uni Press 96) is an approachable introduction
to currents in US film censorship, enlivened by contemporary
criticism such as this account of The Kiss (the sensational
four minute 1896 film):
the spectacle of the prolonged
pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the
stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times
over it is absolutely disgusting.
After that it was on to Pulp
Fiction. Gregory Black's The Catholic Crusade Against The
Movies 1940-75 (Cambridge, Cambridge 97) includes the 1961 demand
from the Legion of Decency that depictions of sticking a tongue in a
lover's ear be deleted, since
this technique cannot be used without
arousing erotically the susceptible members of any audience, anywhere,
any time.
Gerald Garner's The Censorship Papers
(New York, Dodd Mead 87) offers an insider's view of industry self-censorship
1934-68. Movie Censorship &
American Culture (Washington, Smithsonian 96), edited by Francis Couvares, provides an overview of the US
regimes to background the essays in Controlling
Hollywood: Censorship & Regulation in the Studio Era (New
Brunswick, Rutgers Uni Press 00) edited by Matthew
Bernstein. Leonard Leff & Jerold Simmons' Dame in the Kimono:
Hollywood, Censorship, & the Production Code from the 1920's to the 1960's
(New York, Doubleday 91) is lighter.
For the UK Dewe Mathews' Censored: The Story of Film
Censorship in Britain (London, Chatto & Windus 94) is a general
history. James Robertson's The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain
1896-1950 (London, Croom Helm 85) and The Hidden Cinema: British Film
Censorship in Action 1913-1972 (London, Routledge 89) is heavier going
but definitive.
Film Censorship (London, Gollancz 75) by Guy Phelps and
Enid Wistrich's I Don't Mind the Sex It's the Violence: Film Censorship Explored (London, Marion Boyars
78) are more polemical than Bernard Williams' Obscenity and Film Censorship (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 81).
John Trevelyan's What the Censor Saw (London, Michael Joseph 73) is a
popular account.
Annette Kuhn's Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality
1909-1925 (London, Routledge 88) and Anthony Aldgate's Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema & Theatre 1955-1965 (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press
95) catch the UK censors in action at critical times.
music, performance and visual arts
John Johnston's The Lord Chamberlain's
Blue Pencil (London, Hodder & Stoughton 90) is a readable
account of UK theatrical censorship: don't mention the war, the royal
family, the 'F' word, the divinity or indeed anything likely to frighten
the horses up to the 1950s.
Bleep! Censoring Rock & Rap Music
(Westport, Greenwood 99) is a collection of essays edited by Betty Winfield on
contemporary music censorship.
Elizabeth
Childs's Suspended License: Censorship & the Visual Arts
(Seattle, Uni of Washington Press 98) and Robert Post's Censorship &
Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, Public Policy (London:
Oxford Uni Press 98) are academic studies of the US 'culture wars'.
radio and television
Jonathan Wallace's Pervasive Problem
is an article
on recent US Supreme Court decisions about censorship of radio
broadcasts (don't use the F word) as a model for online content
regulation. As we noted earlier, keeping the airwaves free from
nastiness is a task for Australia's ABA.
Heather Hendershot's Saturday Morning Censors:
Television Regulation Before the V-Chip (Durham, Duke
Uni Press 98) and Robert Corn-Revere's Rationales
& Rationalizations: Regulating The Electronic Media
(Washington, Media Institute 97) offer a US perspective.
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