11 Jan 11 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has published a message on his blog claiming his books have been banned in Iran.
The Brazilian author has not been given the specific reasons for this action. However he has said that he has been using social networks to support Arash Hejazi.
Hejazi is the doctor and translator of Coelho’s books to Farsi, who appeared in the footage of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death during the demonstrations following Iran’s disputed presidential elections.
06 Jan 11 | Uncategorized
The publication of a new edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn sans “offensive” words is beyond bizarre.
Professor Alan Gribben, whose bright idea this was, claims that he brought out the edition because the proliferation of the word “nigger” in the book meant that far too many institutions were uncomfortable with teaching it. He’s replaced it with “slave”.
This is actually understandable. I think I’d feel pretty uncomfortable getting schoolchildren to say “nigger” out loud, or even reading the word out loud to them (though I’m genuinely baffled as to why Gribben changed “Injun” to “Indian”. Perhaps it’s a US cultural thing I’m missing. Any explanation appreciated).
But the problem is, when I read a line of dialogue, or even narration out loud, it’s not “me” speaking. It’s the character, or the author. If we are to teach children literature, then this is the key thing they’ll have to grasp from the start.
As important is the realisation that the world we inhabit is not the only world. It is foolish to pretend that the world in Twain’s time is the same as the world now.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
31 Dec 10 | Asia and Pacific, China
Party, a new edgy magazine with contributions from film directors, artists and novelists has been indefinitely shelved because no publisher was willing to run it, confirmed founder and chief editor Han Han on his blog.
Han, best-selling novelist, bad boy, popular blogger and rally driver, wrote on a post headlined: “We’ll Meet Again Some Day” that “It is impossible to publish the second and all future editions of Party, so I hereby announce the disbanding of the [magazine’s] team.”
The 28-year-old added that he could not definitively blame any particular government department for the failure of the magazine.
“So, specifically I don’t know why this happened,” he wrote on his blog. “I don’t know whom I have offended. I am in the open, and you are in the shadows… if one day we meet, then I don’t bear you any grudge, but please tell me what happened.”
The first edition was published last July in book format as a way to bypass strict magazine censorship, although reportedly that was delayed by about six months because of government controls. For the second edition, Han tried to switch to a magazine format, supposedly to gain legitimacy. The original plan was to make Party a bi-monthly literary magazine of around 120 pages.
The propaganda departments needn’t have been so nervous. According to Jeremy Goldkorn, a longtime commentator on Chinese media and the founder of Danwei.org, Party’s first edition was not even that controversial. “It got an anti-establishment attitude, a kind of rebellious feel to it, but there was nothing explicitly anti-government,” Goldkorn told CNN. It included poems, essays and even an extract from Han’s new novel, “I want to talk to the world.”
Even so, it looked like it rattled some in the government since state press poured scorn on the first edition back in July. “Youths mock Han Han’s new magazine,” said the Global Times, an English-language newspaper run by the state-owned People’s Daily. It quoted other young authors as saying Party was “filled with affected and weakly written literature.” However, Han’s magazine proved very popular, selling 1.5m copies in the first few months.
The magazine’s popularity is no doubt due in part to Han’s own celebrity status. He is one of China’s most popular bloggers, clocking up hundreds of millions of views and is famous for his boyish good looks, his books which appeal to China’s youth, and while no dissident, he has won many followers for his sarcastic social commentary.
23 Dec 10 | Asia and Pacific, China
The Ministry of Truth is an Orwellian notion. But in China directives dictating what newspapers can and cannot write about actually exist. China Digital Times (CDT), an excellent online publication co-ordinated by Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley, California collects directives and publishes them on a weekly basis, under the title of the Ministry of Truth directives. The censorship directives aren’t widely available, Xiao’s sources vary, but they include twitter accounts and blogs. The CDT translate the instructions and check “them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.”
A directive published by CDT on 12 December makes clear that after the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony on 10 December, the Ministry of Truth pointedly told newspapers not to report on the Chinese winner of the nobel peace prize dissident Liu Xiaobo. As usual some Chinese citizens and journalists found a way to covertly talk about the issue, one newspaper front page — the groundbreaking Southern Metropolis Daily — broke this rule. The chairs on the cover, which were for a story on the opening of the Asian Para Games, were widely interpreted as representing Liu’s empty chair at the Nobel ceremony, with the cranes apparently indicating a tribute to the empty chair.
One of the comments from netizens, translated by CDT, was:
qqxk 缱绻星空: Congratulating the empty chair??? This is fatalistic. I love Southern Metropolis Daily. Very talented. But I am extremely worried how long [the paper] will last?!!
Other Chinese citzens celebrated the award via the Sina microblog, the hottest new social media in China, which is often used to publish fresh information and celebrate censored events. In the weekend that followed the ceremony, people began to publish descriptions of people they admired, people who just happened to have the surname Liu. Cooincidently these Liu’s seemed to share many attributes with Liu Xiaobo, they had “won many awards” the were also “unjustly accused and spent many years in prison.” The ultimate name, though, would be a celebrated actor, political figure or sportsman. Examples that were wildly circulated were translated by China blog Danwei’s Joel Martinsen:
From @VicCh:
Essay: The person I admire most — “The person I most admire has the surname Liu. He has won major international prizes, and his deeds have inspired a fighting spirit in his countrymen. Although for a time he vanished from our sight, I believe his spirit will live on….” The teacher moves to call the police. The next line: “His name is Liu Xiang (刘翔).”
From @doubleaf (陈双叶) via @songshinan (宋石男):
The person I most admire has the surname Liu. He led students campaigns, published books, and won international prizes. Later he was unjustly accused and spent many years in prison. But I believe that all of this is but the test of history, because he said that fortunately, history is written by the people. His name is Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇).
There have been few other ways of celebrating or reacting to the ceremony this month, either on the internet or in state media. iZaobao, a well-known (and blocked) news analysis blog, mentioned only the “award ceremony in Oslo”, and not to the person or prize by name. Liu Xia, Liu Xiaobo’s wife, is still under close surveillance and had her telephone line was cut on the day of the ceremony. Those who feel the confinement unnecessary so long after the event have condemned this act. Members of Liu’s family are also still prevented from visiting him in prison.
