#books and reading is inherently political and censorship and book burnings have been used for centuries as a way to maintain power

[momentomori24]

You know, sometimes I think that I post too many vent-y or negative things and generally just complaining about people as opposed to posting silly stuff nowadays. I should try to share some joy and whimsy more often and try not to be so angry with people all th-- oh, what's that? People are going on a moral crusade and advocating for censorship on the anti-censorship site known as AO3 all while a glorified cheeto is planning to fuck literature in the face with book bans as is written in his 900 page long manifesto when he hits office in January? Oh. Ok. Nevermind.

[albertstrustie]

Hey, everyone. This is my first time posting something that isn’t just an extract, but I feel like this is something I need to talk about.

Given the current political climate, I’ve found myself immersed in a frustrating debate about whether books are political. Honestly, I never expected to see such a discussion on platforms like BookTok, but here we are. And unsurprisingly, it seems most of these creators having this debate are based in the U.S.—which, given the results of the recent elections, kind of makes sense.

What truly breaks my heart—and challenges my understanding—is that there are people who sincerely believe books should remain apolitical. This belief persists even as one of the most pressing concerns about the recently elected president is his endorsement of policies that could lead to widespread book bans, especially those addressing sensitive topics like race, gender, and history.

Here’s the truth: books are inherently political. The right to read them, own them, and write them has always been deeply tied to power and control. Governments throughout history have used book bans and censorship as tools to erase history, suppress dissent, and manipulate society. Pretending otherwise is, frankly, a privilege. And in the same way, it’s a privilege to be able to write freely or access literature without fear.

To accept this reality is not just to understand the power of books but to respect their role in shaping and challenging our world. Stories carry the weight of culture, resistance, and transformation. To say that books shouldn’t be discussed in a political context is to ignore that power—and to risk losing it.

Let’s not forget: banning books is never just about the books themselves. It’s about silencing voices, erasing perspectives, and controlling what people are allowed to know. To me, the idea of a book being “non-political” is impossible. Every story exists within a context, and that context shapes how we see the world—whether we’re reading a dystopian novel, a historical biography, or even a fantasy epic.

With that being said, this is a quote that deeply resonated with me over the past year:

“those who burn books will in the end burn people.” - Heinrich Heine

[prttygirlposts]

Why is the bookish side of the internet (especially booktok) saying that book centric, online spaces shouldn't be political? Books are inherently political; for example, Harry Potter is political due to its content, author, and controversy as a banned book. However; it is also inherently political because it is a book. Reading is a political act. If you are a reader you are telling the government you have the right to consume these pieces of ideology.

Books have been used as a political ploy since before the common era! Illiteracy and lack of access to literature has been used to discriminate against millions of people. Books have always been political, I don't care what book it is.

Like if I ran this Harry Potter blog, but told people that Harry Potter has nothing to do with trans rights, religious controversy, or dictatorship that would be reading uncritically (which is still bad). If I told people that Harry Potter had nothing to do with witchcraft, that would be the same as saying books/bookish places aren't political. It's just wrong.

One last thing, if you enjoy reading while ignoring book bans, defunded libraries, defunded schools, the taxes that will be raised on books, book burnings that have occurred in recent years, and the censorship of authors because it's just too political- I really wish you the best. That is a really hard amount of ignorance to maintain for someone to have such an intellectually based hobby. Good luck to all of you.

[echoboots]

Red, White, and First Amendment Blues

One of the most fascinating and rapidly evolving news stories this week involves Nordstrom dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, citing poor sales as its reasoning. In case you missed this, here is more-or-less what happened: First it was a simple schadenfreude-laden headline, because the Trump dynasty loves selling things and also is historically bad at it. But the collective amusement turned into incredulous outrage when Trump censured Nordstrom’s from the POTUS account, in typical 45th fashion. Then we all watched a Spicer Double Down Special in yesterday’s press conference, when he referred to the business move as “a direct attack on [the President’s] policies.” And by the time Kellyanne Conway got around to literally advertising Ivanka’s product in her official capacity as a White House adviser today, nothing was surprising anymore.

I’ve seen a lot of people note Conway’s endorsement that was illegal (which it was), that this whole story illustrates Trump’s inherent conflict of interest(which it does), and also that Spicer apparently doesn’t know what the word ‘direct’ means (which he doesn’t). But I also think this is the latest in a larger picture issue, and I don’t hear a lot of people talking about it. And that issue is that this administration is launching a systemic assault on the First Amendment.

What does Trump’s conflict of interest have to do with the First Amendment?

I’m glad you ask, Hypothetical Person in My Head! The key is both Trump and his proxy Spicer censuring Nordstrom’s business decision. The groundwork was laid when Trump criticized Nordstrom’s business decision from the POTUS account, saying: “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. . . . Terrible!” This is because a statement from an official account that something was “unfair” can be reasonably read to carry an implicit threat. But that idea wasn’t fully developed until Spicer said this in the press conference yesterday: “There are clearly efforts to undermine [Ivanka’s] name based on her father’s positions on particular policies that he’s taken. This is a direct attack on his policies.” And it’s when a business decision becomes an “attack” on Presidential policies that the larger picture about the First Amendment starts to take shape. As it happens, these statements taken together tread awfully close to Nordstrom’s right to freedom of speech — specifically its freedom of association and freedom of expressive conduct (And also its freedom to contract, but that’s a whole other ball of wax.).

A Brief First Amendment Primer

For those of you playing the home game, the First Amendment contains more-or-less five basic rights:

Freedom of the press;

Freedom of speech;

Freedom of religion (encompassing both the right to practice religion without government hindrance and the right to freedom from government laws “respecting a religious establishment”);

Freedom to petition; and

Freedom to peaceably assemble.

Though whole treatises could be (and have been) written on this topic, the main thing to take away for now is that the government generally cannot tread on these five things. That includes all branches of the federal government, not just Congress (which is what the First Amendment literally says), and thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment it includes state government as well. (Note that it does not, however, extend to that moderator on reddit who banned that one guy for using slurs, regardless of what that guy is yelling on 4chan.)

Okay, but One Tweet Isn’t an Attack

Good point, Other Hypothetical Person Also in My Head! But this is the part where I remind you that this wasn’t just one tweet in a vacuum — it’s just the latest part of a sustained, systemic effort. Let’s go through that list above, with an eye towards things this administration has done in the past as well as in the past few weeks, and see if they hit all of the First Amendment tickyboxes.

Freedom of the Press: Check. At this point, the 45th discrediting specific members of the press (and especially CNN) as “fake news” has become so commonplace that it’s a recurrent joke on Saturday Night Live. And that skit was hilarious, but it touches on a real phenomenon that’s pretty frightening: The idea that if you report displeasure with the President’s policies, you no longer get to count as real news. This is in addition to a growing rhetoric that the members of the fourth estate are enemies of the state generally, which is popping up in everything from serious allegations that the press is “refusing to cover” terrorist attacks to random statements attacking the “so-called media” over, of all things, reporting on a bathrobe. These statements, taken in tandem, paint a picture of this administration’s general desire to make Americans mistrust news in general.

Freedom of Speech: Check. I covered this one briefly above, but let’s spend a few more minutes on it. This administration has a long-established position of disliking First Amendment freedom of speech, which predates its assumption of office — from threatening to sue the people who stepped forward about sexual assault during his campaign to threatening to jail Hillary Clinton for telling ‘so many lies’ to threatening to remove citizenship for flag-burning. Since taking office, the administration has continued this trend, issuing a communications lockdown impeding executive government staff’s use of social media, demanding that park service officials retract tweets, and beginning to dismantle net neutrality. These actions, taken in tandem, suggest this administration wants people to fear speaking and relaying information freely in a variety of circumstances.

Freedom of Religion: Check. This administration has touched upon both the exercise clause and the establishment clause within the past few weeks. On the exercise end, mounting evidence is being considered by courts that the recent executive order is intended to curtail Muslim entry to the country due to specific Islamophobic animosity within the administration. On the establishment end, we have Trump threatening to dismantle the Johnson Amendment at the National Prayer Breakfast so that Christian organizations can participate more directly in politics, and promising to make persecuted Christians a political priority for immigration. None of this is a good sign, especially so early on in the Presidency.

Freedom to Petition: Check. This one is a more nebulous concept in some ways than the others, but the freedom to petition generally involves being able to talk to government directly about issues with governance. Political texts books often point to things like lobbying, letter-writing, e-mail campaigns, testifying before tribunals, filing lawsuits, supporting referenda, collecting signatures for ballot initiatives, peaceful protests, and picketing. It’s pretty closely tied to the freedom to assemble, which I’ll get to below. But things like shutting down the White House comment line, lying about the number of people who attended the Inauguration, the forcible follow of the POTUS account by 560,000 Twitter users, ignoring one of the most popular We the People petitions in history, and repeatedly attacking the judiciary branch all implicate the freedom to petition, and also all have happened in the past few weeks. Taken together, they suggest this administration wants to make it difficult for constituents as well as other branches of government to interact with its decisions.

Freedom to Assemble: Check. This right applies both to the right to protest and to the general right to associate with other people in things like unions. Though in general the Trump administration has been a bit cagey about this one, we do see early indications that we can expect future infringement of the right of assembly . Trump’s threat to cut federal funding over Berkeley protests is a mixed example at best, but his early description of protests as “unfair,” later description of Madonna’s statements at the Women’s March as “disgraceful to our country,” and more recent iterative rhetoric that protesters are being ‘paid’ all paint a larger picture that can be separated from the violence associated with the Berkeley news. And they come at a time when several state legislators are suggesting criminalizing protest. These things suggest a broader stance against protest generally.

Why does all of this matter?

It matters because the First Amendment collectively is an important check on centralized government process. The Founding Fathers knew this — the anti-federalists fought so hard for a Bill of Rights because they wanted to have a system in place that could slow the federalist machine and prevent it from steamrolling human rights. It’s not a coincidence that the First Amendment is, well, first.

And a natural extension of that is that a healthy enforcement of the Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment in particular, prevents a lot of the hallmarks of fascism from finding purchase (particularly the intertwining of government and religion, controlled mass media, suppression of labor power, and censorship of the arts). It’s a foundational part of American history, and one of the things that does, in fact, make America great. We’ve seen a lot of discussion about whether Trump’s administration is ushering in an era of fascism, and I personally believe that it is. In order for a nascent fascist state to take root in the United States, the Bill of Rights and especially the First Amendment (along with the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Tenth) need to be bludgeoned into submission. And we’re watching it happen, one tweet at a time.

What can we be doing? (Besides getting the 45th to stop tweeting. That isn’t going to happen.)

Okay, you raise a compelling counterpoint, Final Hypothetical Person, despite the noted disadvantage of not actually existing. But there are things we can be doing nonetheless!

Resist normalization of deviance. This is basically just a fancy sociological way of saying that there is real actual societal value in stamping “This Isn’t Normal” on your forehead and yelling it every time something infringes on a First Amendment right. On a related note, Amy Siskind recommends keeping a list of all of the things you notice changing around you — experts say this can be a very effective technique for resisting normalization. She keeps a weekly list herself, and you can read this past week’s here.

Continue to exercise your own rights, especially the last two. Protest things! Sign petitions! Call your senators and yell a lot! Obviously, this is easier for some people than others, but one very real way to preserve rights is to exercise them.

Keep track of the news. You can’t know your rights are being infringed if you aren’t paying attention — but more importantly, you also don’t know when your rights are being protected. The Ninth Circuit took a big step towards protecting freedom of religion today, though that fight is far from over, and that’s really helpful to know — it’s a form of petition being successfully preserved, at least so far.

Take care of yourself. It’s the best way to keep on fighting.

And on that note, I am going to take my own advice, and save writing about today’s three executive orders for tomorrow. Self-care, folks. It’s a thing. But you’ll hear from me again soon!

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

IN THE POST–WORLD WAR II political shuffle, China and Albania found themselves joined in an alliance of necessity. Neither country was keen to make cozy with the capitalist West or Stalinist Russia, so pickings were slim. The resulting period of “eternal friendship” between China and Albania lasted as long as their prevailing political ideologies roughly aligned — from around 1958 to the early 1970s. Anouck Durand’s photocomic Eternal Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Zuba, uses this brief moment of attempted political harmony as the context for an invented narrative based on the real-life experiences of Albanian photographer Refik Veseli. During the war, Refik’s family helped the Mandils, a Jewish family, evade Nazi capture. In the process, Refik formed a friendship with Gavra Mandil and learned photography from Gavra’s father, Mosha. After the war, the Mandils resettled in Israel. Due to Albania’s strict censorship policies, Refik struggled to maintain contact with Gavra after the move.

Eternal Friendship pairs a diary-like narrative written in the voice of Refik with archival photographs, a combination that explores the intersection of personal and national history. The book opens in 1970, when Refik visits China at the behest of the Albanian government. He has been dispatched with a delegation of state photographers, ostensibly to learn the trichrome photographic printing process. The trip itself is part of a state propaganda campaign to promote a sense of unity between China and Albania. Refik, who is not a state ideologue, goes with the private purpose of sending a letter to Gavra from China, thereby bypassing the Albanian censors.

Early communist states idealized photography as an inherently socialist art form grounded in science and capable of pure representation. Photography was touted as a tool of the revolution, one that could prove the viability of the communist project. During the period covered by Eternal Friendship, the production and distribution of photography was tightly controlled by the Chinese and Albanian governments. Each state published only images that supported the narratives they intended to tell about themselves — stories of collective strength, advanced industrial technology, and military power. The photographs used by Durand depict parades of people carrying banners with slogans such as “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and Albanian people” and “Welcome comrades of the heroic Albanian people.” Other images show smiling partisans holding rifles or threshing wheat, smokestacks rising from industrial iron latticework, ballistic missiles, and anti-aircraft cannons. Eternal Friendship contextualizes these images in a manner that subverts and repurposes their original function. Propaganda photographs are used not as evidence of China and Albania’s “eternal friendship,” but as evidence of the Chinese and Albanian governments’ attempt to construct such a friendship.

The most obvious level of subversion at work in Eternal Friendship comes from the insertion of photographs into the book’s larger narrative. One picture depicts Refik and the Albanian photographer Pleurat Sulo standing among a line of smiling workers outside of a factory. In context, this photo is transformed from evidence of a strong and satisfied working class into a picture of a man posing so that he can get a chance to mail an unedited letter to his faraway friend.

But Durand also uses text to call out the staged nature of the photographs. Refik’s delegation poses with various locals in a series of photographs accompanied by a caption reading, “The Chinese have provided us with new cameras: a ‘Red Flag’ for each of us, the local replica of the Leica. The scenes to be photographed are also provided.” Elsewhere the book reveals that Albanian photographers had at this point long been using Kodak film, which was superior to the putatively new trichrome printing process they were taught by the Chinese. “We hope they won’t take away our Kodak film,” Durand writes in Refik’s voice.

Eternal Friendship repeatedly juxtaposes personal story with the tendency of communist art to eschew the individual and highlight collective struggle. The book does not include Refik on every page, nor do the pictures follow any sort of continuing action. Instead Durand intersperses photographs of Refik and his delegation with collective partisan imagery. Yet the text never ceases to comment upon each image from Refik’s perspective, explaining the constrained and constructed nature of the trip. Refik was sent to China to learn a new printing process, but he was also sent to generate photographic evidence of political cooperation. He fulfilled the latter mission, but the story of his personal reasons for making the trip undercut the very documentary evidence that he has produced.

Durand also cleverly crops archival images to invoke his motif of individual versus collective. One of the first pictures she includes is a painting of the two nations’ leaders, Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxha, clasping hands. The accompanying text reads, “The friendship of brotherhood … solid like granite … unites our two countries. China and Albania.” This is most probably the intended message of this painting at its creation. The following page is a photograph of a stadium, filled with people, above which hang the portraits of each country’s respective leader. Durand divides this image into two panels, inserting a thin white gutter through the center of what was once a single image, separating the leaders’ portraits. On the following page, Refik is introduced with the same technique. What appears to be a larger photograph of a parade is cropped to focus on individual marchers to whom we are introduced: Refik Veseli, Pleurat Sulo, and Katjusha Kumi. The text, in Refik’s voice, comments on the strangeness of being “on this side of the camera.” In this way, Durand invites us to examine the individuals within the photograph of the collective whole.

Finally, the very use of these photos is subversive, as both governments attempted to destroy these archives when the Chinese-Albanian relationship deteriorated and each sought to erase the evidence of their former relationship. Some pictures used by Durand bear marks of the attempted destruction in the form of scratched-out and burned faces. Once the state is no longer interested in publishing (or even preserving) the images, their function switches from propaganda to evidence. In the 1970s, the farce of an eternal friendship between China and Albania might have been believable. But presented in the context of the 21st century, knowing that this period of cooperation barely lasted 20 years, the claim deflates.

The latter portion of Eternal Friendship is devoted more exclusively to Refik’s history and his friendship with the Mandils. The images in this section include pictures from Refik’s personal collection — sentimental photographs and individual portraits that one might find in a family album. Instead of the plain white background and grid-like placement utilized in the first part of the book, these images appear as though imprecisely pasted atop blue construction paper. While the pictures are aesthetically placed, they are neither perfectly aligned nor divided by consistently-sized gutters. This portion of the book resembles a scrapbook more than a comic book. Durand also includes a letter written by Gavra nominating Refik’s family as “Righteous Among Nations,” which ultimately enabled the two to reunite in 1990.

This letter of nomination is, like the state propaganda photographs, a sort of fabrication. The sentiment may be heartfelt, but as with any political document, it is molded toward a specific purpose. In this respect, it parallels the photos in this section, which one might expect to be more personal than those documenting Refik’s visit to China, but which remain just as beholden to ulterior purposes. Refik’s family photographs are staged: the children are corralled to sit still just like the factory workers. The subjects are carefully posed and smile for the camera. Ironically, there are more seemingly candid shots in the first portion of the book.

As with the propaganda photos, the personal photographs contain multiple meanings that Durand sets out to reveal. One image shows Gavra and his sister standing in front of a Christmas tree. This was taken by their father to be used as advertising for his photo studio, and later repurposed as evidence of their Christianity designed to forestall Nazi harassment. A picture of Mosha and Gavra standing next to one another and smiling appears at first to be a generic family photograph. Its true import is revealed, however, by the accompanying text: “With Mosha (left) finally out of hiding in the basement: freedom!” Without these captions, a viewer would be unlikely to discern that these seemingly mundane pictures depict years of elusion and evasion — hiding in cramped basements, false identities, and even time in prison. One of the final images in the book was taken in 1990, when Gavra and Refik are reunited at last. It is among the only seemingly candid photographs in this section. Other people in the photo are not looking at the camera, and one person (either Refik or Gavra) holds his hands above his head in celebration, even though this obstructs the composition of the photo.

In this way, Durand primes us to rethink the propaganda photos she has shown us earlier. Even though we know these photos were staged, this does not change the fact that these people did meet and stand among one another. The artificial impetus of these meetings need not necessarily have precluded authentic connection. Nothing prevented Refik from enjoying the company of the factory workers. Put another way, if the family photos are as staged as the propaganda photos, then it follows that the propaganda photos are at least potentially as authentic as the family photos.

Eternal Friendship is a project of archival recontextualization. It does not merely revise or define the meaning of the images Durand selects, but situates these pictures within multiple contexts. The state propaganda photo offers, in addition to its intended purpose, a glimpse of Refik’s visit to China and evidence of the state manipulation of history. The studio advertisement becomes a tool of escape and subversion. A nomination letter functions as a political plea, but also serves as an authentic testament of friendship. In this context, it becomes impossible to definitively state what the archive shows about the past. While telling a compelling personal story of friendship, Eternal Friendship also explores the flexible nature of the image. Photography constructs histories, about ourselves and about our societies. But what a photograph reveals changes with time, and it is often not a single story.

¤

Will Moore is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where he studies nonfiction, essays, and comics. His comics, interviews, and critical reviews have been published in The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, and ImageTexT.

The post Recontextualizing the Archive: On Anouck Durand’s “Eternal Friendship” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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