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99 books match the query 'Censorship' and 15 start with c

cover of Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity

Censorium

Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity

William Mazzarella

Duke University Press, 2013

In the world of globalized media, provocative images trigger culture wars between traditionalists and cosmopolitans, between censors and defenders of free expression. But are images censored because of what they mean, what they do, or what they might become? And must audiences be protected because of what they understand, what they feel, or what they might imagine?

At the intersection of anthropology, media studies, and critical theory, Censorium is a pathbreaking analysis of Indian film censorship. The book encompasses two moments of moral panic: the consolidation of the cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, and the global avalanche of images unleashed by liberalization since the early 1990s. Exploring breaks and continuities in film censorship across colonial and postcolonial moments, William Mazzarella argues that the censors' obsessive focus on the unacceptable content of certain images and the unruly behavior of particular audiences displaces a problem that they constantly confront yet cannot directly acknowledge: the volatile relation between mass affect and collective meaning. Grounded in a close analysis of cinema regulation in the world's largest democracy, Censorium ultimately brings light to the elusive foundations of political and cultural sovereignty in mass-mediated societies.

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cover of Censorship and Interpretation

Censorship and Interpretation

Annabel M. Patterson

University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

Annabel Patterson explores the effects of censorship on both writing and reading in early modern England, drawing analogies and connections with France during the same period.
 

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cover of Censorship and Selection: Issues and Answers for Schools

Censorship and Selection

Issues and Answers for Schools

Henry Reichman

American Library Association, 2001

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cover of Censorship and Self-Censorship in History Education: A Comparative Approach to Backsliding Democracies

Censorship and Self-Censorship in History Education

A Comparative Approach to Backsliding Democracies

Ruben Zeeman

Central European University Press, 2026

Censorship of history education takes place around the world. A striking feature of recent examples is that they often coincide with challenges to democratic governance. This book examines this interplay between censorship and self-censorship in history education and so-called democratic backsliding. It does so in two parts. The first brings together an interdisciplinary group of academics, high school teachers and human rights advocates to assess the characteristics of censorship and self-censorship in Brazil, India, Hungary and the United States. Their analyses move between local, national and transnational developments to capture the overlaps and differences between state and non-state censorial practices and strategies of resistance. The second, thematic part explores some of the formal characteristics of contemporary censorship of history education, including the impact of social media, continuities of colonialism and the challenges against gender and sexuality education.
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cover of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

By Monika Mehta

University of Texas Press, 2011

India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema. She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship's role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring.

Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.

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cover of Censorship in Romania

Censorship in Romania

Lidia Vianu

Central European University Press, 1998

Through a series of interviews with prominent Romanian literary figures and a select presentation of their writings, Lidia Vianu asks how, under communism, did Romanian writers cope with constant ideological shifts and, in turn, respond to the censorship that so often accompanied such changes? Now that Romania has emerged from almost fifty years of Communist rule, what is the current status of censorship? These writers are important because, though working under the terror of communism, they dared to put their thoughts into writing, remaining true to their craft, and, in some instances, even arranging for publication. Vianu has chosen a series of subversive writings that not only indicted communism but were also widely embraced by the Romanian public. The author continues to argue that after the fall of communism and the disappearance of subversive literature, the Romanian public started to devour works of translation. A somewhat different form of censorship arose: state-sponsored censorship was replaced by what Vianu terms a crisis of native writing.
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cover of Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World

Censorship in Vietnam

Brave New World

Thomas A. Bass

University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

What does censorship do to a culture? How do censors justify their work? What are the mechanisms by which censorship—and self-censorship—alter people's sense of time and memory, truth and reality? Thomas Bass faced these questions when The Spy Who Loved Us, his account of the famous Time magazine journalist and double agent Pham Xuan An, was published in a Vietnamese edition. When the book finally appeared in 2014, after five years of negotiations with Vietnamese censors, more than four hundred passages had been altered or cut from the text.

After the book was published, Bass flew to Vietnam to meet his censors, at least the half dozen who would speak with him. In Censorship in Vietnam, he describes these meetings and examines how censorship works, both in Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. An exemplary piece of investigative reporting, Censorship in Vietnam opens a window into the country today and shows us the precarious nature of intellectual freedom in a world governed by suppression.
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cover of Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era

Cinema Civil Rights

Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era

Scott, Ellen C

Rutgers University Press, 2015

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.

Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.

Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.
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cover of Cinema under National Reconstruction: State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture

Cinema under National Reconstruction

State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture

Hye Seung Chung

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Cinema under National Reconstruction calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961–1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive’s digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok’s The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong’s The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho’s Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reassessing censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.
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cover of Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968

Classical Film Violence

Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968

Prince, Stephen

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Stephen Prince has written the first book to examine the interplay between the aesthetics and the censorship of violence in classic Hollywood films from 1930 to 1968, the era of the Production Code, when filmmakers were required to have their scripts approved before they could start production. He explains how Hollywood's filmmakers designed violence in response to the regulations of the Production Code and regional censors. Graphic violence in today's movies actually has its roots in these early films. Hollywood's filmmakers were drawn to violent scenes and "pushed the envelope" of what they could depict by manipulating the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Prince shows that many choices about camera position, editing, and blocking of the action and sound were functional responses by filmmakers to regulatory constraints, necessary for approval from the PCA and then in surviving scrutiny by state and municipal censor boards.

This book is the first stylistic history of American screen violence that is grounded in industry documentation. Using PCA files, Prince traces the negotiations over violence carried out by filmmakers and officials and shows how the outcome left its traces on picture and sound in the films.

Almost everything revealed by this research is contrary to what most have believed about Hollywood and film violence. With chapters such as "Throwing the Extra Punch" and "Cruelty, Sadism, and the Horror Film," this book will become the defining work on classical film violence and its connection to the graphic mayhem of today's movies.
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cover of Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Cold War Broadcasting

Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

R. Eugene Parta

Central European University Press, 2010

The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.
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cover of Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling

Compelling Belief

The Culture of American Schooling

Stephen Arons

University of Massachusetts Press, 1986

This book is about the stifling of dissent by an institution widely acclaimed as the bulwark of democracy in America. It may be no surprise to late twentieth-century cynics that institutions eventually destroy goals they were meant to achieve; but it is nevertheless a paradox that a society should repress intellectual freedom with the institution of education.
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cover of Contemporary Censorship and Performance, Volume 38

Contemporary Censorship and Performance, Volume 38

Miriam Felton-Dansky and Tom Sellar, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

This special issue of Theater explores the political, cultural, and economic factors that have led to controversies surrounding live performance around the world. Recent global political shifts have resulted in renewed interest in questions of censorship and free expression and have demonstrated that theater has become a cultural third rail, igniting controversy and provoking attempts at suppression. Contributors explore manifestations of theater censorship—from New York to Birmingham (England) to Beirut to Tashkent (Uzbekistan)—and address both direct, state-sponsored suppression as well as the disparate cultural pressures that hamper theatrical expression, such as financial pressures and political, ethnic, and religious sensitivities.

The collection includes an essay that explores the function of live performance in recent freedom-of-expression debates, such as those featuring Janet Jackson and Don Imus, and persistent national anxieties about performers’ bodies. The issue also features an international censorship forum that brings together reports of incidents from Burma, Singapore, Germany, Italy, and the United States. A special report from Zimbabwe provides an in-depth look at the repression of oppositional theater by one of Africa’s most dictatorial regimes while another article looks at REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony, a new musical composition that takes once-silenced voices recorded for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and transforms them into a hymn for a postapartheid nation. The issue also includes the first publication of an inventive new play that is a satirical as well as chilling look at suppression and dissent in post-9/11 America.

Contributors: Howard Barker, Reverend Billy, Catherine Cole, Mike Daisey, Dean Damjanovski, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, John Houchin, Rabih Mroué, Freddie Rokem, Tom Sellar, Fadi Toufiq, Praise Zenenga

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cover of Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era

Controlling Hollywood

Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era

Bernstein, Matthew

Rutgers University Press, 1999

For every movie shown on the big screen, there exists a behind-the-scene story of regulation and control. What social factors determine which movies get made and shown? What is censored? And how have the standards of what is considered taboo changed over time?

Controlling Hollywood features ten innovative and accessible essays that examine some of the major turning points, crises, and contradictions affecting the making and showing of Hollywood movies from the 1910s through the early 1970s. The articles included here examine landmark legal cases; various self-regulating agencies and systems in the film industry (from the National Board of Review to the ratings system); and, external to Hollywood, the religious and social interest groups and government bodies that took a strong interest in film entertainment over the decades.

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cover of Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel

Cracks in the Wall

Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel

Ben White

Pluto Press, 2018

After decades of occupation and creeping annexation, the situation on the ground in Palestine/Israel can only be described as a system of apartheid. Peace efforts have failed because of one, inconvenient truth: the Israeli maximum on offer does not meet the Palestinian minimum, or the standards of international law.

But while the situation on the ground is bleak, Ben White argues that there are widening cracks in Israel's traditional pillars of support. Opposition to Israeli policies and even critiques of Zionism are growing in Jewish communities, as well as amongst Western progressives. The election of Donald Trump has served as a catalyst for these processes, including the transformation of Israel from a partisan issue into one that divides the US establishment. Meanwhile, the Palestinian-led boycott campaign is gathering momentum, prompting a desperate backlash by Israel and its allies.

With sharp analysis, Ben White says now is the time to plot a course that avoids the mistakes of the past - a way forward beyond apartheid in Palestine. The solution is not partition and ethnic separation, but equality and self-determination - for all.
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