“Book banning” is a term that we, as a society, are all too familiar with. In recent times, there has been an uproar politicizing what kind of materials are available to the general public —specifically, younger audiences. Yet, this phenomenon isn’t unheard of; it’s a power tactic that has been around for centuries. As our democratic right to read is up for debate, the University of Pittsburgh’s English department gives students access to historically challenged texts in the literature course, Banned Books, where students read and assess the context in which they were restricted.
Censorship Is Nothing New
Book censorship has been around since the creation of written materials. Dating back to 212 BCE, when Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti burned all books in his kingdom, keeping just one copy of each book for the Royal Library—book bans have always been a tactic for those in power. If the ruling body objects to content, ideas, themes, or symbols represented in certain texts, they may restrict, remove, or even burn books.
Some of the most renowned books have been tried and tested throughout history. In AD 8, Ovid was banished from Rome for writing Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love; in AD 35, Homer’s The Odyssey was restricted for its representation of freedom—something which was deemed dangerous. Even Galileo’s theories about astronomical functions were condemned by the Catholic church in the seventeenth century. Time and time again, texts that encourage free, liberal thinking have been restricted to uphold existing ideals.
Book banning is a way to control what the public is exposed to, and a way for those in power to try and uphold specific social values. Shakespeare’s works have faced several modes of censorship: scenes have been removed (such as a scene in Richard II where a king is deposed, which Queen Elizabeth I despised); entire productions were banned (King Lear was restricted from 1788 to 1820 at the behest of the reigning monarch, King George III); over time, entire texts have been revised for “immodest” content. Each of these instances represents the cultural mood of the period and demonstrates how a threat towards authoritative figures can be repressed.
Despite the antiquity of book banning, there has recently been a precarious turn toward book restriction in the United States—specifically within children’s literature. There is a fear that children will be swayed by the media, or that the content they read may introduce topics that young audiences shouldn’t be exposed to. Many books subject to censorship in parts of the United States include those with LGBTQIA+ themes, diverse racial representation, sexual content, and violence.
In 2023, the American Library Association (ALA) reported the highest number of challenged book titles ever. With 4,240 unique book titles challenged, there was a 92-percent increase in censorship attempts compared to 2022. Of these titles, 47 percent of them had LGBTQIA+ and racially diverse voices and themes.
Pressure to ban these sorts of books in libraries and public schools is mostly coming from right-wing activist organizations, politicians, and parents. They claim that, because schools and libraries are publicly funded, they have a right to communal censorship.
One group that has had an extreme influence on book banning is Moms for Liberty, with chapters in 48 states. They are a parent group founded in 2021 that advocates against curricula mentioning LGBTQIA+ rights, race and ethnicity, “critical race theory” and discrimination. Another group is Parents Advocating for Children’s Education (PACE), which challenges books that, in their words, teach children to “defeat their inner white demon” and refers to book removals as “detox.” Yet another problematic extremist group is MassResistance, an anti-LGBTQIA+ organization that is “pro-family activism” and fights for removal of queer representation in schools.
What many of these groups have in common is the fact that they claim to represent parents. Recently, the extent of parental rights has been called into question; this has been countered by the argument that, while parents can certainly control what media their own child has access to, their jurisdiction shouldn’t reach onto other people’s families. And even though parents do have control over their kids, opponents of censorship insist that children still need to be exposed to ranges of content to form their own ideas! If kids only read certain materials and are fed specific beliefs, these children won’t flourish and discover the world for themselves—resulting in a community of like-minded discriminatory youth.
To rise against these challenges, there are several organizations and communities fighting back. The ALA, along with other supporters, annually celebrates Banned Books Week in September, urging young audiences to read books that are or have been banned—and feed their minds. In 2022, ALA also launched “Unite Against Book Bans” to empower readers to fight against the rise of censorship. Students aren’t standing idly by, either. They have been staging school walkouts to resist book bans, sitting in on school board meetings, and making their voices heard.
Pitt English Leans In
The University of Pittsburgh’s English department is encouraging its students to attend to an abundance of controversial literary texts with the undergraduate course, Banned Books. Co-designed over ten years ago by Teaching Professors Mark Best and Uma Satyavolu Rau, Banned Books examines the historical prevalence of banning books.
“When you think about [book banning] historically, I’m hoping that the students will make connections to what is happening, especially emerging now, in our culture, in our time, in our spaces,” Satyavolu said. “The design of this course did not anticipate that it would become so relevant. I still feel, even when we are in the midst of it, that the best way to get students to think about it is to give them the precedents.”
This course examines the ways in which book access reflects a given society. Why were certain books banned in certain cultures? What does that say about the cultural climate? The class urges students to question canons and seek historical literary truths within restricted books.
Satyavolu calls attention to the nonuniversal freedom of reading books and how that access has been limited throughout history. Referring to the private reading classes for young women in post-Islamic Revolution Iran that Azar Nafisi recounts in her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Satyavolu noted that reading such books may be empowering for people in restricted conditions.
“You have to have the threat of something being taken away in order for it to become an important thing,” Satyavolu said. “So, it’s a fundamental question. What should we know? What should we read? Who tells us what we should read? It’s a conjunction of a historical moment that everybody’s interested in, and I constantly revisit that.” 
Reflecting on universal book access, Satyavolu recalled her own experiences with book availability in her home country, India, and how that was the driving factor for her move to the United States.
“I came to the US because I thought this was the best place for access to books,” Satyavolu confessed. “There were books that I wanted to read which, even in a liberal family, I could not have access to. I would read about libraries where there were millions of volumes, and I wanted to be in that place, as a 22-year-old person who loved books.”
Satyavolu felt the urge to design this class years ago because she encourages her students to “question canons” in an environment where they have so much access to information.
“We should constantly question canons. Should we really be reading Milton, or Shakespeare, or whoever?” Satyavolu asked. “Information, knowledge, and especially truth are to be valued. I feel that’s the premise of every class, every week, and every course that I teach. That should be a central thing; we should be interested in truth and all the different ways in which literature and the humanities approach [it].”
Plenty of students at Pitt are interested in exploring this aspect of truth, demonstrated by how the Banned Books course fills up instantaneously during enrollment seasons. This course is highly sought after because of the relevance to students’ lives, Satyavolu suspects.
“[The] banning of books, strangely, is closer to the undergraduate student life, from their experience in being in schools, than any of us could have anticipated,” Satyavolu said. “I underestimated, or did not understand, the desire to understand the nature of control over things. The last 10 years—2016 and onwards—have been about that encroachment upon what was taken to be established as liberal democratic principles. . . . Students who’ve been graduating in the last eight years have a much greater awareness of what is at stake.”
Thanks to this class, Ijeoma Ekpelibe, a recent physics and astronomy graduate who took Banned Books this past spring, recognizes the “danger with controlling stories that are written.” Despite it being outside her typical realm of studies, Banned Books became one of her favorite classes at Pitt and has “very much broadened [her] horizons.”
“It all comes back to the saying, ‘History is written by the winners,’” Ekpelibe reflected. “The danger with controlling stories that are written—especially in contesting viewpoints to what is the overall accepted narrative—tends to be this loss of history that just sort of ripples down . . . at the end of the day, you can’t kill a story, but the only way to limit it is for people to stop reading it. So [censorship] creates a very single-minded view on historical events, and [erases] a lot of the interconnected nature of history.”
Banned books are so interesting because of “the story about the story,” according to Satyavolu. Students are drawn to specific books not necessarily because of the plot, but because of the context in which it was challenged and how that reflects on its respective society.
This is true for Patrick Francis, a recent English literature and political science graduate who took Banned Books this past spring. He took the class not just because of Satyavolu’s superb teaching skills, but because the topic directly aligned with his interests.
“My interest in literature has always been related to the political and economical context [of a book], what it’s saying about society in general, and what books do in that way,” Francis said. “The course is very good at reminding us the importance of our liberal values of free speech, freedom from government intervention in how we express ourselves and what we write, and the value of public discourse. And it’s taking a very global approach to understanding that.”
Some of the challenged books read in this course are denser texts. Yet this is what Satyavolu calls the “broccoli aspect of the course,” because the texts are necessary reads in a banned books class, no matter how long or difficult.
“I have a responsibility to the field, to the discipline of English literary studies,” Satyavolu explained. “So, yeah, maybe nobody wants to read ‘Nausicaa,’ the chapter from Ulysses, but you have to know why Ulysses is a central text. There are certain books that I consider absolutely essential in understanding that a book is a historical moment and not just an object.”
Yet, as more titles are being challenged each year in the United States, Satyavolu is constantly revisiting the course’s syllabus. She allows students to give their input on what they want to read, to keep the class up to date with current events.
“There is a space for students to come in and say, ‘This is what is happening now, here’s what I’m finding out about it now.’ Because there is no sort of established critical canon . . . they have to find out about these issues, and we have to talk about it in class also,” Satyavolu said.
Ekpelibe was expecting to read a lot of books that have “been taken out of circulation, for one reason or another,” which happened—but some of the titles caught her by surprise. Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, depicts the author’s struggle growing up in Iran before and after the late twentieth-century Iranian Revolution. Ekpelibe was shocked at how different this novel was from other texts in the class, such as Lolita and The Satanic Verses.
“I really feel that a lot of the restrictions around this book are more centered around its format than its content, because it is a graphic novel,” Ekpelibe explained. “Many people interpreted that alone as meaning the text was intended for a younger audience, whereas, in and of itself, the subject matter isn’t all that far out of the format it has been put in. I just really found that interesting in comparison to the other texts that we’ve read.”
Ekpelibe, who is originally from New Zealand, noted that a book like Persepolis “wouldn’t be restricted in New Zealand, just because we’ve had women’s rights for a lot longer.” She thinks that this is because of a certain “taught” American mindset.
“Just from where I’m looking at it, [I think it has] to do with the way that people have been educated over the years with a very, I suppose, conservative mindset,” Ekpelibe said, “especially coming out after World War II. It was very much this push towards the American dream, which obviously has been failing for a lot of people. That’s actually one of things that we’re talking about in this class with The 1619 Project.”’
The American ideal of flawlessness is something that intrigues Francis as well. He thinks that there has been a rise in book banning because of what schools “want” to teach our children.
“When you take someone like Toni Morrison, who suddenly shakes faith in the idea of America as this flawless nation that has never committed any sins whatsoever,” Francis highlighted, “there’s a sentiment among those who want to ban books that their child should not have to critically engage with America’s past.”
Yet there are certain communities who want to live in their personal, ideal America—which can include denying certain demographics. Francis pointed out the controversy surrounding LGBTQIA+ representation in texts like Maya Kobabe’s Genderqueer—a book that explores Kobabe’s gender identity and sexuality throughout their life. Francis said that some people might want to ban books such as Genderqueer because it “goes against [their] romantic nationalist ideal of what America should be.”
This is a phenomenon that Satyavolu and early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Bloch describe as “asynchronicity of the synchronous.” Satyavolu explained how people “can be in the same space, sharing the same texts, but can have completely different attitudes and understandings of a text.” This, she says, is what is happening today.
“We think, because we live in 2024 and in the United States, that all individuals or all communities or all states, regions, or groups are at the same place in modernity,” Satyavolu said, ”whereas they’re asynchronous. Some people still inhabit, and would like to inhabit, 1950s America. Some people would go back to, I don’t know, 1904. So people who live in Florida, or people who want to control what their children read or who think that being exposed to the idea of gender fluidity is going to negatively impact the upbringing of their children inhabit a different moment of modernity than the 2024 in which I assume you and I are living.”
The biggest area of concern is children’s literature, and Satyavolu highlights a “disjunction” between grade school libraries and higher education.
“What librarians do, school acquisitions do, is very different from what somebody like me does, who assumes and can assume a certain kind of freedom,” Satyavolu said. “Emily Knox [who comes to book banning from a librarian position], says that the people who truly believe in the power of the word are the people who care enough to ban books. The people who want to be on school boards and councils to control what students read are in some ways truly aware of the power of the word. This is the paradox, and this is the danger.”
So book banning isn’t so much about the book itself but the anxiety that our youth will rise above troubling, outdated ideals and change the state of American culture. Books, such as those featuring dystopian societies, open children’s eyes to problematic beliefs and may light the way for a better, more equal future—something that may scare some generations.
“Most of us are not present to that moment of ignition when you read that book, and it shimmers, and you see something, and your life is transformed,” Satyavolu said. “Paradoxically, the people who know this are the people who want to ban them.”
The biggest way to combat the rise of book bans is to promote “a culture of education,” according to Satyavolu. When one person is educated, they’ll spread their knowledge to others, eventually creating a society with higher awareness about the importance of books—this is Satyavolu’s goal as a teacher.
“All of the work that I do is about creating cultures of literacy, knowledge, awareness. This ripple will happen in the classroom,” Satyavolu explained. “One person ripples out and gives the knowledge: the culture of knowledge, rather than the culture of adamant and self-imposed ignorance.”
Francis is hopeful for the pushback against this latest wave of book banning. He is from York, Pennsylvania, home to Central York High School, which made national news for attempting to ban around 300 books in 2021. Yet these attempts were counteracted by many parents and community members, and “suddenly, a lot of people came to awareness of what was happening there.”
“We’re starting to see a lot of those trends rewind,” Francis suspected. “I think, right now, those on the side of liberty are winning.”
Satyavolu’s Banned Books course takes a global approach to connect current book bans and historical attempts at censorship, reminding students of all aspects of history.
“Book banning is not an American phenomenon, nor is it a new one, and the course more than ever reminds us how it is always a fight to ensure that we have the right to write and to read,” Francis said.
—Briana Bindus
Briana Bindus, associate editor for The Fifth Floor, is a rising junior pursuing a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in English Literature and Communications. She believes in empowering all voices, which she aims to do through her passion for journalism.