The spring 2019 edition of Index on Censorship magazine looks at local news in the UK and round the world and what happens to democracy when it disappears
Contents: Is this all the local news?
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Decades of articles by world’s leading writers now free as Index on Censorship magazine archive becomes available without subscription
Index on Censorship is pleased to announce that the online archive of 45 years of publications of Index on Censorship magazine, published by SAGE Publishing, will be free to read globally.
Thirty years on: the Salman Rushdie fatwa revisited
Thirty years after a fatwa was issued ordering Muslims to execute author Salman Rushdie over the publication of The Satanic Verses, Index publishes a collection of writing on the implications for free expression and censorship
Student reading list: The Iranian Revolution
Forty years ago the rule of the last shah of Iran came to an end after millions of Iranians, from all social classes, took to the streets in protest
Birth, marriage and death: Index magazine on Resonance FM
Rachael Jolley, Sally Gimson and Tracey Bagshaw discuss the latest issue which takes a special look at why different societies stop people discussing the most significant events in life
Birth, marriage and death: Confronting taboos at Index winter magazine launch
“I found it empowering to be told I couldn’t talk about something,” said Gabby Edlin, founder of Bloody Good Period on the topic of period taboos at the launch of the winter Index on Censorship magazine
回忆天安门
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
Five myths about contraception and pregnancy laid bare
Sex and pregnancy continue to be taboo subjects around the world as a special report in Index on Censorship magazine shows
Student reading list: Art and protest
Art has been used as a form of protest during times of crisis throughout history. It is a popular and, at times, effective platform to express opinions about societal problems
Why we find it impossible to talk about birth, death and marriage
Birth, marriage and death–these are key staging posts. And that’s one reason why this issue looks at how taboos around these subjects have a critical impact on our world.
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.