A look into the recently founded ‘Banned Book Society’ as they seek to foster discussions on campus about free speech, censorship and banned books.
“There’s nothing more sexy than reading a book you’ve been told you can’t read,” says Jennie Gardner, President of Glasgow Uni’s new ‘Banned Book Society’. The society was born from Jennie’s time abroad in Vancouver, where she experienced an incredibly welcoming community of students whilst also reading her favourite banned book, Maus by Art Spiegelman. “It was almost like I had been given this gift and I had to do something with it.” The society’s core idea is to create a strong and welcoming community interested in “having open conversations as an act of political rebellion” to promote discussions on free speech and the threat of losing our intellectual freedoms.
The society itself plans to be multi-faceted, consisting of three core concepts. The first component will be a monthly newsletter where students can express themselves freely through submissions of poetry, graphic design, articles, among many other things. This newsletter acts as a resistance against notions of censorship and the constriction of ideas. Jennie addresses how a society on free speech: “can very quickly become a race to the bottom of hate” and discusses that submissions will not be accepted “based on the ideas but rather the values behind it. We do not stand for hate or for oppression”. The second element of the society will be the book club. This, Jennie asserts, is going to be a very simple concept, and the conversations to be had will speak for themselves. The point is to chat as a community, discuss why any given book has been banned, and to drink some coffee in the process. The book club meetings will be held in cafés around the West End. Voting will be held to choose each book, and at the beginning of each month, a rundown of the book will be posted to give time for members to read the book. Jennie also prefaces that having read the book is not mandatory to attend meetings and that discussions will be open to everyone. Lastly, the third aspect will be socials, both intellectually-oriented with a series of guest speakers as well as event-oriented with pub-crawls and social events. “Really, our primary focus will be [fighting] censorship and [promoting] individualism” Jennie says, as well as fostering community, and fighting the idea that you should “only ever [be] yourself to the point that you can be like someone else”. The society’s goal is to be a breeding ground for having open conversations with different people who possess different opinions.
Jennie comments on the well-known idea that the best publicity a book can get is if it gets banned by saying, “When you deem ideas dangerous, they become seductive to people”. She then adds, “It’s so interesting because it’s this duality from my perspective that there is this fighting of intellectualism through banning books and you think ideas can break society, which I think they can, but the ideas being banned are normally ones that are inclusive”. The Banned Book Society seeks to discuss why books are getting banned and why the themes in these books are being promoted as dangerous. Jennie also observes how the freedom of speech has changed with the emergence of ‘social media’ language, in that she believes “You’re not saying what you think because you don’t know how to articulate it” and notes that “reading is kind of like empathy and what the media is really good at doing is dehumanising other people and creating a process of conceptual othering that you learn from a really young age”. Additionally, throughout this inability to express ourselves is “the development of artificial intelligence, further censoring us in ways we are not even fully conscious of”. It is important now more than ever that we as students foster discourse on censorship in society and just how normalised it has become to be censored or subconsciously trained to avoid certain topics of discussion. The Guardian newspaper writes that the UK is swiftly following American trends of increasingly banning more books and that the main themes that cause books to become banned are those related to “empire, race and LGBTQ+ themes”. Treasurer of the Banned Book Society, Juanita Haynes wrote: “I would like [the society] to amplify the voices of marginalized communities affected by censorship. We should be aware of global censorship because these things do not exist in isolation.” With an increasing amount of topics being deemed dangerous, it is necessary that we employ literature as a tool to dismantle social and political barriers that have been built by the rise of authoritarianism.
By promoting shared spaces like that of the Banned Book Society, more open discussions can be had with people who have different opinions and perspectives to offer. Only then can the notion of free speech truly be achieved and employed as acts of productive political rebellion. “It’s rare to come into contact with someone you disagree with and say, ‘I will hear you out, and we can disagree, and we can still be friends’. I think one of the reasons for polarisation is this inability to sit in discomfort and to allow the discomfort of one of us is objectively wrong, but that’s okay; we can still have this kind of mutual respect and nuance that we don’t have anymore, that now has led to extremism” Jennie says.
The society hosted its launch event on 26 February at Glasgow’s West End Kaffeteria, as well as hosting its first pub crawl social event on 12 March. The society will be holding its Annual General Meeting on 30 March, where a host of board member positions will be open for students to run for. Additionally, the monthly newsletter has begun taking submissions, and more information on future events and book club meetings will be posted on the society’s website and social media. As she promotes Banned Books’ recent launch, Jennie says, “I have big ambitions for society, and I want it to set a precedent about how we should discuss free speech as a community”.
Image credits: Jennie Gardner
