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“How Trump’s presidency affected book sales and bans in America” – Elsa Lassoux

As long as books have been written, there has been censorship, following religious and political changes. Book sales also often coincide with political and societal events.

In 2020, after protests over the police killing of George Floyd prompted new conversations about structural racism in the United States, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order banning any type of training that suggests the U.S. is fundamentally racist. The order was retracted by President Biden, but seven states have since implemented the ban, and fifteen have a possible ban in progress. Professor Matsuda, quoted in The New York Times in 2021, describes Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a map for change: “For me,” she said, “Critical Race Theory is a method that takes the lived experience of racism seriously, using history and social reality to explain how racism operates in American law and culture, toward the end of eliminating the harmful effects of racism and bringing about a just and healthy world for all”.

Going hand in hand with limiting the study of Critical Race Theory, 2021 has seen the attempts to ban books in the United States surge to its highest level since the American Library Association began tracking book challenges 20 years ago (Harris, Alter, 2021). Most of these titles are young adult titles whose presence in school libraries and syllabuses is being challenged.

The association said most of the targeted books dealt with the subject of race or gender. For reference, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States during the 1990s, so sensitivity over the topic of race hasn’t changed, but the intensity with which the public focuses on it comes in waves that follow political events. Just last year, Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved, which won a Pulitzer prize, was contested by a Virginian Republican candidate.

 

The 10 most contested books of 2021
(Source : New York Times)

 

There is a striking dichotomy between the commodification of Black art and bodies and the rejection of the Black perspective and history in America today. On the one hand, Black culture has never been so popular, from music to movies to dance styles. The same goes with queer artists who produce a consequential portion of American entertainement. On the other hand, the government is constantly suppressing those communities’ rights, from voter suppression to “Don’t say gay” bills to medical discrimination.

Since Trump’s election, a lot of dystopian classics have seen renewed interest. On top of that list we find George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Sinclair Lewis’ It can’t happen here, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Written during the Reagan era, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler was on the New York Times best-seller list for the first time in 2020, almost thirty years after it was published in 1993. This renewed and unprecedented interest in her fiction can be explained by the fact that it deals both with the collapse of American society and race. She wrote it as a cautionary tale of what she thought might happen if we did not make conscious choices to improve our society. The novel takes place in the 2020’s. American society has grown unstable because of climate change, corporate greed, and wealth inequality. Water and food are scarce, big pharma rules, crime and mass incarceration are rampant as people must fight over resources. There is an extreme right wing president who wants to make America great again, censors the media and inspires hate and violence among his followers. Butler was inspired by Ronald Reagan when she wrote the character, but her description of President Donner shocked new readers in all the ways that it resembled Donald Trump.

            As the US is facing an unprecedented wave of book bannings, free speech advocates are growing concerned that democracy is at risk. Butler’s fiction is here to remind us that if our worst tendencies are predictable, they might also be avoidable.

 

Elsa Lassoux – Master 2 Etudes anglophones


Bibliography

  • AGUIRRE Abby, “Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to ‘Make America Great Again’ ”, New Yorker, 26 July 2017.
  • FORTIN Jacey, “Critical Race Theory: A Brief History”, The New York Times, 08/11/2021.
  • HARRIS Elizabeth A., ALTER Alexandra, “Book Banning Efforts Surged in 2021. These Titles Were the Most Targeted”, The New York Times, 04/04/2021.
  • NICCOLINI Alyssa D., “Precocious Knowledge: Using Banned Books to Engage in a Youth Lens”, The English Journal, vol. 104, no. 3, 2015, pp. 22–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24484452. Accessed 17 May 2022.
  • ROSSUCK Jennifer, “Banned Books: A Study of Censorship”, The English Journal, vol. 86, no. 2, 1997, pp. 67–70, https://doi.org/10.2307/819679. Accessed 17 May 2022.
  • WHEELER Brian, “The Trump era’s top-selling dystopian novels”, BBC News, 2017

OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
mastersfdl (15 juillet 2022). “How Trump’s presidency affected book sales and bans in America” – Elsa Lassoux. Investigatio. Consulté le 20 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/ra89


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