Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) has been reinstated in the curriculum of US’s Wentzville School District in St Louis, Missouri, after the board reviewed and reversed its decision to ban the book, following a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU) on behalf of students. In January, the board had banned eight books from school libraries in the district on the ground that they dealt with issues such as race, gender and sexual identity. Besides, Morrison’s debut novel, the other books that were banned include Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Paperback by Alison Bechdel (2006); Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014), by Isabel Quintero; Modern Romance (2015), by Aziz Ansari; Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), by Kiese Laymon; Lawn Boy (2018), by Jonathan Evison; All Boys Aren't Blue (2020), by George M Johnson; and Invisible Girl (2020), by Lisa Jewell. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Set in 1940-41, in Morrison’s hometown Lorain, Ohio, The Bluest Eye is a pathbreaking exploration of race and gender that placed Black girls—and women—at the heart of literary narratives. Through the account of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African American girl who wants the titular blue eye, Morrison, the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, explores the obsession with White norms of beauty and the struggle and violations—sexual, emotional, social—that come with being Black, poor and female. Morrison, who was 39 at the time of The Bluest Eye’s publication and was working as a senior editor in publishing house Random House, later said in interviews that she intended the book to be a reflection of the kind of literature and representation she wanted to read—and could not find—amid the Black pushback headlined by the Black is Beautiful movement in the 1960s. “Most of what was being published by Black men were very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction and non-fiction…And I thought why so loud?” the author, who passed away in 2019, said in a 2004 interview. Since its publication, The Bluest Eye has often found itself in banning rows in the US because of its depiction of violence, racism and sexual violence, including incest. According to the American Library Association (ALA), which documents attempts to challenge and ban books in schools and libraries in the US, The Bluest Eye was one of the 10 most banned books in the US between 2000 and 2020. America’s run-in with book bans, challenges Challenges and bans on books are not new in the US, or around the world. As recently as January, a school in Tennessee had removed Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980), a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum, because of profanity, violence and nudity. Over the last decade, the US has seen an overwhelming rise in the number of calls to report or remove books from curricula and libraries. Apart from Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, among those books that have repeatedly had run-ins with censorship are Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960); John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and George (2015) by Alex Gino. Between 2000 and 2009, ALA records that J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books headlined its most-challenged lists across the US, for, among other things, promoting witchcraft among Christians. A BBC report by Anthony Zurcher last month on book bans across America noted that according to ALA’s initial data for the months of September, October and November alone in 2021, there had been 330 incidents as compared to 377 incidents reported for the whole of 2019, when schools in the US were open in person before the pandemic. One of the reasons behind the sharp increase in censorship calls in the US and across the world, policy watchers and free-speech advocates have noted, is linked to the rise in right-wing conservative governments and the proliferation of social media. The ALA counts LGBTQ+ themes, depictions of sexuality, race and religion, among the most common reasons behind calls for censorship in the US. Social media has further exacerbated moral panic and outrage over diverse and critical works at local and state levels, by taking cues from majoritarian politics at a national level. However, it has also brought together people defending free speech, who argue that exposure to diversity through literature is a way to combat illiberal conservatism. Newsletter | Click to get the day's best explainers in your inbox
