Thread by @PENamerica

As more schools target ‘Maus,’ Art Spiegelman’s fears are deepening, reports @ThePlumLineGS

Read free: wapo.st/3qE61IJ #BannedBooks #Censorship 🧵

As they target 'pornography' or 'woke indoctrination,' "Right-wing culture warriors pushing restrictions on classroom instruction sometimes defend these measures by insisting... they avoid targeting historically or intellectually significant material," writes @ThePlumLineGS (2/x)

"A new fracas involving a school board in Missouri will test this premise... it indicates that those seeking to censor books seem oddly unconstrained by the principle that they are supposed to avoid restricting important, challenging historical material." #Maus #BannedBooks (3/x)

"'It’s one more book — just throw it on the bonfire,' Spiegelman told me ruefully, suggesting the impulse to target books seems to have a built-in tendency to expand, sweeping in even his Pulitzer-winning #Maus under absurd pretenses." #BannedBooks (4/x)

"It’s not yet clear what (Nixa school board) employees found objectionable. But #Maus—which illustrates Spiegelman’s parents’ experience of the Holocaust and features Nazis as cats and Jews as mice—graphically depicts his mother naked in a bathtub after taking her own life" (5/x)

"Last fall, however, a handful of other school boards in Missouri pulled #Maus from schools (one board subsequently restored it after PEN America sounded the alarm)... now that the Nixa board is also mulling the fate of Maus, Spiegelman decided to speak out once again." (6/x)

"The... targeting of #Maus over alleged sexual content, Spiegelman lamented, is a mere pretext. 'It was the other things making them uncomfortable, like genocide... I just tried to make them clean and understandable, which is the purpose of storytelling with pictures.'" (7/x)

Writes Sargent: "When I asked Nixa School Board President... why the book had been flagged, he told me it has been identified as 'potentially violative' of school policy and state & federal law, without providing detail on which provisions might have been violated, or how." (8/x)

"What alarms Spiegelman about the targeting of #Maus on specious grounds, he told me, is that its 'fable' form was able to reach a broad audience with a story 'about dehumanizing people' and 'othering'." (9/x)

"Spiegelman suggested those looking to restrict books are seeking to limit school curriculums with their own acts of othering.

'Those others can include Asians, Indigenous Americans, Black people, Muslims — not to mention LGBTQ and beyond,' Spiegelman said." (10/x)

Writes @ThePlumLineGS: "Even if those targeting books are genuinely motivated by narrow objections to supposedly sexual content, they often seem undisturbed when those objections result in the removal of material with profound historical significance" (11/x) #BannedBooks #History

"... That was what happened when a Florida school limited access to @TheAmandaGorman’s poem recited at President Biden’s inauguration on utterly absurd grounds...." (12/13) #BannedBooks

"The move’s defenders didn’t seem remotely troubled by the message it might send to students — that a paean to unity read by a young Black poet marking our fraught national transition to a new presidency might somehow be inappropriate for children." (13/13)