Canadian Literary Censorship Project 2022-23
We’re trying to discover and document the extent of banned and challenged books in Canada. Insofar as literary works communicate the values, aspirations, and anxieties of a society, the censorship of those texts might be taken as a bellwether for the overall health of that society, a measure of its citizens’ willingness to engage in unorthodox ideas or even their complicity in inequitable systems of power.
Data from the American Library Association show that literary censorship disproportionately targets authors and audiences of systemically marginalized groups: people of colour and those who identify within the LGBTQ2S community are, historically, much more likely to have their literary works censored. In Canada, however, there is currently no comprehensive, systematic, or readily-searchable compilation of censored literary works. Led by Prof. Alexander Hollenberg (Principal Investigator) with support from Dr. Brandon McFarlane (Co-investigator), and Dr. Owen Percy (Co-Investigator), we seek to remedy this knowledge gap.
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