The Student Room Group
Uni students - Complete our survey >>
Uni students - Complete our survey >>
Uni students - Complete our survey >>

Racist books could be pulled from shelves

Edit: Sorry, wrong thread
(edited 6 years ago)
Reply 1
Avatar for Wōden
Wōden
15
Original post by Mathemagicien
Trigger warning: Incredibly offensive racial stereotyping. Viewer discretion advised. Might be fatal to the professionally offended.

Spoiler



What the ****
#triggered
It has been happening for years.

There was a Tintin adventure called Tintin au Congo which was withdrawn because it was written about Colonial Africa in the 1930's and considered too racist.

The publishers may have had a point to be fair!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Angry_King_in_Tintin.JPG

And in the 1950's and 60's Enid Blyton had a series about a character called Noddy in which the baddies were black and the heroes blonde white children.

The books were republished with the offensive and offending characters removed..

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6359248/Noddy-returns-without-the-golliwogs.html
(edited 7 years ago)
A lot of old books unfortunately suffer this fate.:sadnod:
"If you've got a Middle Eastern background, for example, you can get tired of rarely being portrayed as being one of the good guys in literature"

I've never given a damn about the fact that so many Hollywood films have English people as the bad guys.

But then I'm from a superior culture, so I don't have an inferiority complex.
So basically publisher no longer wishes for a couple of books to be part of its portfolio. Bit of a non-story.
Original post by Mathemagicien
Don't underestimate the seriousness of self-censorship, which is a huge problem in Sweden and Germany.


I don't see it as self censorship, just a lot of guff about cultural stereotypes which always gets SJWs, be they right or left wing, heated. Is there anything stopping him from publishing with a different publisher? Or publishing himself?
Original post by Mathemagicien


Trigger warning: Incredibly offensive racial stereotyping. Viewer discretion advised. Might be fatal to the professionally offended.

Spoiler

http://www.thelocal.se/20160509/racist-swedish-kids-books-risk-being-discontinued


SJW's insist that we change the the way the past viewed things to prevent offence in the present.

Even the classics get the treatment...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jan/05/censoring-mark-twain-n-word-unacceptable

I am waiting for the day that The Merchant of Venice gets cleaned up to prevent the portrayal of Jews as grasping money lenders after their "pound of flesh" and Othello improved to prevent the depiction of black men as insanely jealous, wife murderers. :rolleyes:
I'm offended by the fact they feel racial minorities are incapable of ignoring such stereotypes.
Original post by Mathemagicien
Two books by Swedish author Jan Lööf may be removed from circulation after an investigation revealed that they contained "stereotypical depictions of other cultures".



You are doing a bit of cultural imperialism yourself here with the Swedes. You are assuming that Swedish attitudes to those images ought to be the same as yours. However, no British author in 1966 would have made a stereotypical pirate, a Muslim called Abdullah. A British author would have made him a Brit called Yellowbeard or something like that and he would have carried a cutlass not a scimitar.

Original post by JezWeCan!
It has been happening for years.

There was a Tintin adventure called Tintin au Congo which was withdrawn because it was written about Colonial Africa in the 1930's and considered too racist.

The publishers may have had a point to be fair!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Angry_King_in_Tintin.JPG



Tintin in the Congo is a special case. Unlike all the other Tintin books, it wasn't published in English at the time because of the offensiveness of its content. The first English edition was the 60th anniversary collectors' edition in 1991 and the more offensive 1946 edition (the one you have shown) wasn't published in English, again only to collectors, until 2005. Contemporary English language reading parents would have associated Belgium with atrocities in the Congo.

Tintin in the Congo was never withdrawn in French and was very popular in Francophone black Africa. Interestingly when first published in Swedish in 1975, the issue wasn't the book's racism but its attitude to wildlife (torturing and blowing up a rhinoceros amongst other things) that attracted controversy.
Starting to sympathise with Anders more and more these days. But then it's been going on for a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COt65HZCJaA
99.999% of teh population will not give a **** about those books being pulled and certainly won't go posting threads about it on the internet.

The people being triggered by this story are probably the same types that got triggered by Sophie Okonedo being cast as Margaret of Anjou.
The guy looks like henrich himmler anyone?

Posted from TSR Mobile
This isn't government censorship. More like market capitalism.


The market has spoken.
Original post by nulli tertius
You are doing a bit of cultural imperialism yourself here with the Swedes. You are assuming that Swedish attitudes to those images ought to be the same as yours. However, no British author in 1966 would have made a stereotypical pirate, a Muslim called Abdullah. A British author would have made him a Brit called Yellowbeard or something like that and he would have carried a cutlass not a scimitar.

That is correct, our piratical stereotypes are based on buccaneers of broadly British blood, plundering the Spanish Main. And wonderful tales they are too, based as they are on a kernel of historical truth.

What is interesting is why Swedes have some form of collective folk memory of Muslim pirates.

You wouldn't have thought the Barbary pirates made many forays off the Swedish coast although they did make it as far as Iceland I believe.

Maybe some Swedes were captured and enslaved? Or is it purely a literary phenomenon?

Whatever. Muslim piracy, which was very extensive for several centuries is a historical fact, and it is very craven to completely expunge it from the culture as the Swedes are attempting to do.




Original post by nulli tertius


Tintin in the Congo is a special case. Unlike all the other Tintin books, it wasn't published in English at the time because of the offensiveness of its content. The first English edition was the 60th anniversary collectors' edition in 1991 and the more offensive 1946 edition (the one you have shown) wasn't published in English, again only to collectors, until 2005. Contemporary English language reading parents would have associated Belgium with atrocities in the Congo.

Tintin in the Congo was never withdrawn in French and was very popular in Francophone black Africa. Interestingly when first published in Swedish in 1975, the issue wasn't the book's racism but its attitude to wildlife (torturing and blowing up a rhinoceros amongst other things) that attracted controversy.


A fellow Tintin buff? Good man if so.

I couldn't find an English edition of Congo as you said during my Tintin years (peak Tintin so to speak) and read it in French. Not my favourite by a long long way, in fact read more for duty than pleasure...

If you ARE a Tintin man, you will recall, since we were discussing pirates the wonderful scenes on that subject in Red Rackham's Treasure. :smile:

There was a Tintin exhibition in Somerset House earlier this year. Rather disappointing.
Ludicrous. I don't know anything about these books but art and literature should NEVER be censored. There's no reason for it except the usual puritans trying to feel good about themselves by going on a moral crusade.

Quick Reply

Related discussions

Latest

Trending

Trending

Articles for you