Editor-in-chief Rachael Jolley argues in the autumn 2019 issue of Index on Censorship magazine that travel restrictions and snooping into your social media at the frontier are new ways of suppressing ideas
Big Brother at the border
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Contents: Border forces: how barriers to free thought got tough
The autumn 2019 edition of Index on Censorship magazine looks at how border controls round the world have got tougher and are proving barriers to free expression
Border Forces
The autumn 2019 Index on Censorship magazine examines how border officials are demanding access to individuals’ social media accounts at frontiers around the world. This is ushering in a frightening new era where people are worried that their words, their criticism and taking part in a protest will end in a travel ban. In this issue Steven Borowiec writes about the toughest border of all between North and South Korea where South Koreans can be prosecuted for communicating with relatives in the north. Jan Fox reports how an opera singer who wanted a US visa removed posts from her Facebook page because she thought they might prevent her visiting. And Mark Frary looks at the difficulties for LGBT people travelling to some countries. Meanwhile Ela Stapley offers her top ten tips for securing your information when you pass borders, and Meera Selva looks at how governments are using internet shutdowns to control their populations, with India using it frequently to control information in Kashmir. We also publish an extract for the first time in English of Marguerite Duras’ screenplay for the 1977 film Le Camion (The Lorry) and a poem about male rape by the controversial award-winning poet Dean Atta. Also modern day writers Elif Shafak, Kerry Hudson and Emilie Pine plus theatre director Nicholas Hytner reflect on the lessons of past index contributors Nadine Gordimer, Václav Havel, Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller
Podcast: Border forces with Peppermint, Ariana Drehsler and Steven Borowiec
The autumn Index on Censorship magazine podcast with Peppermint, Ariana Drehsler and Steven Borowiec exploring how travel restrictions at borders are limiting the flow of free thought and ideas
Laugh and the World Laughs with Me
Laugh and the World Laughs with Me is an intimate short story of a young woman who has a schizophrenic brother, set against the backdrop of the Tahrir Square demonstrations, from Egyptian writer Eman Abdelrahim.
Free speech was being suppressed in Kashmir for a long time before the latest crisis
We report on the border region’s long-term crackdown on communications well before the latest news blackout. Rituparna Chatterjee, talked to academics and journalists about what it has been like to live there
中国私语
八九学运领袖王丹同著名作家欣然探讨天安门学运结果及其遗产
诗人多多经历死亡后接受访问
八九学运领袖王丹同著名作家欣然探讨天安门学运结果及其遗产
Andrew Graham-Yooll on Argentina
Andrew Graham-Yooll served as editor for the Index on Censorship magazine from 1989-1994. To honour his memory, Index features some highlights of his writing for the magazine about his home country Argentina
In memory of Andrew Graham-Yooll
Former editor of Index on Censorship magazine Judith Vidal-Hall remembers her friend and former Index colleague
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.