Using a sociological and philosophical approach, this paper discusses the legitimacy, utility and functionality of art censorship both as a social practice and as an autonomous discourse. My intervention reconstitutes and deconstructs the legal arguments underlying the decision to censor artistic products, by investigating the most common accusations by which the law seeks to justify art censorship: immorality (pornography, obscenity), the encouragement of indecent behaviour or incitement to...   ⇨ Read more

The phenomenal popularity of the Internet literature in China and the potential for freedom of speech in China’s cyberspace have long fascinated scholars of contemporary China. This article examines the interaction between Chinese Internet literature and the ever-increasing online censorship by focusing on one type of Internet literature in China: the allegorical ghost stories. While observers of censorship in China have expressed worries about the tightening censorship in China’s cyberspace and...   ⇨ Read more

In mid-nineteenth century Paris, when an art education was out of reach for most women artists, several male painters began opening private schools specifically catering to women. In Catholic Spain, opportunities were more restricted; therefore, leaving the country and attending these French ateliers were key to women’s training as no government-sponsored academies accepted women at the time. By means of archival and historical research, this analysis applies theories of Judith Butler to explore the careers of...   ⇨ Read more

Zimbabwe has a culture of protest art in theatre with a long history that goes back to the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1980. However, a culture of subversive art in other artistic genres, such as visual arts, has emerged in recent years. This paper focuses on the fate of two art events, a theatre play and a visual arts exhibition, both closed down and banned in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city, which is also regarded as the country’s cultural capital. In 2007, The Good...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims at retracing Ana Blandianaʼs ban from publishing, between 1988 and 1989; it also looks at the way in which the writer managed to elude censorship. Ana Blandiana was banned from publishing during the one and a half year before the end of the communist regime in Romania. The reviews of her last poetry anthology were banned, but not the anthology itself, which was published shortly after the author’s ban from publishing. Ana Blandianaʼs name was allowed to appear in literary studies about...   ⇨ Read more

The paper analyses the most significant Romanian literary representation of First World War in which femininity is imagined as subversive to the “negative myth” of the conflagration. In the Romanian culture, this so-called “negative myth” is of such great magnitude that the literary works that anathemize the historical event responsible for the birth of Greater Romania are labelled as attacks on the nation. A discordant note to the above mentioned demythologizing tendency is struck by a series of female...   ⇨ Read more

This paper attempts to demonstrate how Ellison and Morrison’s prose is interwoven with markers of oral literature, oraliture or orature. This oraliture draws upon African culture. To better deconstruct the Africanism or the different fragments of African culture in the fiction of the two writers under study, I focus on Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey and Jennings' Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. For example, fairy tales, the sermons of Homer Barbee and the Jazz music of Louis Armstrong, are...   ⇨ Read more

The purpose of this paper is to explore Maya Angelou’s depiction of trauma in her autobiographical fiction as a marginalized female experience which shapes the identity of the subject and speaks about the psychological integrity of the Black female. Memory functions as the process of psychological healing through the narrative reformulation of her life during childhood and adulthood. Angelou has deliberately expanded the conventional structure of the autobiographical genre by the fragmentary approach and the...   ⇨ Read more

Political humour, as an indispensable part of popular culture, played a complex role under communism in Romania. It was a catalyst of the general discontent towards the catastrophic effects of Ceausescu’s megalomaniac dictatorship, a forbidden, dangerous means of expressing opposition. This dynamic part of folklore captured and exposed essential aspects of life in Communism, from the permanent fear of the Securitate to the ever-growing ridicule of the presidential couple and their acolytes. Unforgiving jokes...   ⇨ Read more

From the traditional perspective of interventionist or “regulatory,” censorship has gained along the democratic era a “polymorphous nature,” as Francesca Billiani designates it. Conceptual changes represent the base of the “new censorship,” also known as “constitutive” or “structural,” in terms conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu. These new perspectives upon censorship depart from the ideological restrictions specific to totalitarian regimes while they are also defined by mechanisms of repressing intellectual...   ⇨ Read more

This paper attempts to investigate the prevalence of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ in the ’70s, using the means of the quantitative studies and macroanalysis, as they are theorised by Franco Moretti and Matthew L. Jockers. We will focus on how the subversive nature of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ can be detected through quantitative analysis of textual structures (thematic, lexis). In the political context of the ’70s, due to the imposing of certain restrictions (we are referring to the July...   ⇨ Read more

Nicole MOORE, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary. A Global View, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, ISBN 978-1-6289-2009-3, 260 p.

Liviu MALIȚA, Heretical Literature. Politically Censored Texts between 1949-1977, București: Cartea Românească, 2016, ISBN: 978-973-23-3140-8, 372 p.

Petr Bubeníček, Subversive Adaptations. Czech Literature on Screen behind the Iron Curtain, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, ISBN 978-3-319-40960-3, 224 p.

Brigitte LE JUEZ, Nina SHIEL, Mark WALLACE (eds.), (Re)Writing Without Borders. Contemporary Intermedial Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts, Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks, 2018, ISBN 9781612299938, 207 p.

Simona MITROIU (ed.), Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan: 2018, ISBN 978-3-319-96832-2, 272 p.