Book censorship hits close to home during Banned Books Week


In a guest blog for The Washington Post on Sept. 23, James Blasingame laments the recent bans of classic books in southern Arizona.

Blasingame, an associate professor of English at Arizona State University and a young adult literature specialist, discussed the removal of National Book Award finalist “Dreaming in Cuban” by Christina Garcia from high school classes in Sierra Vista, Ariz. for “sexually explicit” passages.

Ironically, the Sierra Vista School District’s move to ban the book came just before the national observance of Banned Books Week. The annual event, this year celebrated Sept. 22-28, sponsored in-part by the American Library Association and endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, is designed to bring awareness to censorship.

According to Blasingame, the moves to challenge this and other books in schools conflict with U.S. court decisions offering balance on the issue.

“Over and over again, courts have found that a book must be judged by its ‘dominant themes,’ must be judged as a whole – not by individual parts, taking into consideration, as stated in 1973: Miller v. California, redeeming ‘literary, artistic, political or scientific value,’” Blasingame said in the article.

“The bottom line in terms of court precedents is basically that while parents do indeed have the right to the final say on what their children read in school, no parent has the right to determine what other people’s children read in school.”

Blasingame directs the English education program in the Department of English, an academic unit in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Article source: The Washington Post

More ASU in the news

 

Once thought a fantasy, effort to sequence DNA of millions of species gains momentum

Arizona State and EPIXC joint projects aimed at reducing CO2 emissions

How this voter hotline will help tribal voters navigate ballot box obstacles on Election Day