Another good article about it, that asks white & black, academic and lay people what they think. Gotta say, the case for watering it down is about as thin as water:
Should Huck Finn get a 21st-century revision? SEÁN O'DRISCOLL, The Irish Times The word ‘nigger’ has been replaced by ‘slave’ in one US publisher’s new versions of Mark Twain’s classic novels – but should texts really be sanitised?
SITTING AT his desk in Montgomery, Alabama, Prof Alan Gribben is weathering a storm he knew was coming. “Of course there was going to be trouble,” he says with a shrug. “You don’t change Mark Twain and not expect the walls to come crashing down.”
This week, an Alabama publishing company, NewSouth, announced it will be releasing Gribben’s altered version of Mark Twain’s classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , in which the word “nigger” is replaced with “slave”, while the word “injun” is replaced by “Indian”.
It’s the removal of the first word (used 219 times in Huckleberry Finn ) that has cultural commentators frothing with outrage this week. Some have called the new version an “abstinence-only” approach to discussing racism, while others have heralded the arrival of the politically correct apocalypse, the point of no return for liberal thought police.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” says Gribben, an Aubern University professor who has been vilified by both the left and right. “Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.” But he isn’t here and he can’t answer for himself. Maybe Twain would have screamed in indignation that his work was being robbed of its original meaning.
Gribben, a likeable straight talker, is adamant that he is not robbing Twain of anything, merely making a small change so that English teachers are no longer embarrassed to read out loud in class.
But should literature really be changed to avoid the blushes of English teachers? For a cut-and-paste digital generation, is literature just another mash-up that can be altered to suit demand? “I sincerely hope not because it would be very, very bad for American literature,” says Randall L Kennedy, who is probably the world’s greatest expert on the N word (he never uses such euphemisms), having written a widely discussed social history book called Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Kennedy, an American law professor at Harvard University, is among a large group of black commentators who denounced Gribben this week.
“It’s a profoundly bad idea,” he says. “The word ‘nigger’ appears in the autobiography of Malcolm X, should that be removed as well?” But it’s not the same thing, is it? Mark Twain was white, Malcolm X was not, the context is very different.
Kennedy sighs. “No, I really don’t think so. If the word is hurtful and contemptuous, then it ought to be condemned no matter who is speaking.”
I wonder if there isn’t a certain power play going on here. A white professor wants the word removed because it makes him squirm, a black professor wants it included. Isn’t that squirming a form of social control over white people? A way of keeping them forever awkward and eager to please? “Now that’s an interesting argument,” says Kennedy.
“By removing the word from Mark Twain, we are losing the opportunity to discuss. If I was an English teacher, I would relish the opportunity to talk about my own feelings and open the discussion to the classroom. Now that’s having a real argument, that’s showing your students respect.”
I wondered what other black people thought of the N word and whether removing it from Twain would help bury a painful past or save white America from confronting its own history. I was pondering all on the subway on the way home when I heard two black teenagers talking. “Hey nigga, what’s up with you?” said one. The reply was instant “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me nigga, something wrong with you though.”
Enter white Irish reporter with a copy of Huckleberry Finn and a massive avalanche of awkwardness. I stutter through an explanation of my article and show them a few of Mark Twain’s offending passages.
The first, 17-year-old Laurence Johnson, picks up the book, studies it for a moment and shuts it suddenly.
“So he said ‘nigger’. So what? People think slave owners called us African-Americans?” he says loudly. His friend laughs, so do some middle-aged black women sitting nearby, all of whom nod in agreement. Johnson, who is in his final year of high school in Brooklyn, puts himself in the place of a slave owner counting his slaves.
“One, two, three, four . . . damn, we got an African-American escaped up north!”
More laughter, some of the women are clapping their hands. “It’s about the timing,” says one of them, Katicha Spencer, a 42-year-old dental nurse from Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. “If some white person said that word to me, I’d be mad as hell. But if it’s from 100 years ago, and it’s someone trying to get the flavour of what people are saying, then that’s what people said. You can’t sugarcoat the past of this country, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.” Her friends nod in agreement. “Mark Twain’s alright,” says one. “He’s not my boss.” Katicha gives her a high five and they laugh as they leave the train.
I wondered what artists who had to read racist lines thought about this type of censorship.
One who should know is Tony nominee Kelli O’Hara, star of the musical South Pacific, which is touring the US. This current controversial performance is faithful to the words of James Michener, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific and who explored themes of racism, including a line where the heroine wonders if she can marry a man who has black children.
“Basically, any line in the original that made us shudder, we included,” says O’Hara. “If you don’t stick to the original intent of the art, then what are you doing? Serving up easy comedy while glossing over the racism of the time? Go back to the book and see what it says, see what Twain or Michener are saying about race.”
“Of course I understand those arguments,” says Suzanne La Rosa, co-founder of NewSouth, the company that is releasing the new racially sensitive Mark Twain. Prof Gribben is “a man of pure heart” who came up with a brilliant idea and NewSouth rushed to it, she says.
“I think it was about five minutes after his presentation that we went: ‘Oh my God, let’s do it. If we can get these great books to a wider audience with a gentler Twain, then the heck with it, I’ll do it’.”
La Rosa does not shy away from admitting that there are commercial concerns behind the new “gentler” Twain lite. “Of course, if we can get his book back into American schools, that would be really great for a small publishing company like ours.”
Her greatest motivation, she insists, is bringing Twain to people who would not otherwise read his work. “So we remove an offensive word that has a different context today than it did when he wrote it. The fact that we are having this debate at all shows just how explosive that word remains today.”
93: Slane
96: Cork, Dublin
00: Dublin
06: London, Dublin
07: London, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
09: Manchester, London
10: Dublin, Belfast, London & Berlin
11: San José
12: Isle of Wight, Copenhagen, Ed in Manchester & London x2
Hey Dharma... Happy New Year... see you at the next gig... whatever gig that is.
...
Regarding Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Mark Twain... in a word... CONTEXT.
What is the context in which the word is being used? Nigger Jim and Injun Joe were fictional characters in a book about a time in American History when those terms were used as adjectives by the characters living in the South during the time of slavery. That is the context... The South, during slavery and relatively illiterate poor country folk. Huck Finn, who was raised to believe that slavery was natural and abolition was wrong, befriends Nigger Jim and discovers that race doesn't matter and the worth of a man's character... his honor and his freedom does. The term was never used by Huck Finn in hatred.
An YES... it would be extremely offensive if anyone were to use those terms as adjectives today... even in the South... by dumb fucks. Hypocritical? Not when the context is taken into consideration... with the greatest consideration being... it is 2011 today, not 1860.
So, changing literature in the name of what? Political correctness? I say leave the original content and inject the human intellect and focus on the story... instead of getting hung up on a word.
It's hard to imagine where we might be if books like this were never written; by Twain, by Fredrick Douglas, by the roster of black authors who wrote stories to frame these aspects of life in the time they lived it. The argument against this nonsense has been repeated a dozen times: it's impossible to learn from our history and mistakes if we ignore it.
Guess what. I remember reading this when I was young, and although I am older, I remember it. But, I remember STORY, not that the n-word was used 219 times.
Another good article about it, that asks white & black, academic and lay people what they think. Gotta say, the case for watering it down is about as thin as water:
Should Huck Finn get a 21st-century revision? SEÁN O'DRISCOLL, The Irish Times The word ‘nigger’ has been replaced by ‘slave’ in one US publisher’s new versions of Mark Twain’s classic novels – but should texts really be sanitised?
SITTING AT his desk in Montgomery, Alabama, Prof Alan Gribben is weathering a storm he knew was coming. “Of course there was going to be trouble,” he says with a shrug. “You don’t change Mark Twain and not expect the walls to come crashing down.”
This week, an Alabama publishing company, NewSouth, announced it will be releasing Gribben’s altered version of Mark Twain’s classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , in which the word “nigger” is replaced with “slave”, while the word “injun” is replaced by “Indian”.
It’s the removal of the first word (used 219 times in Huckleberry Finn ) that has cultural commentators frothing with outrage this week. Some have called the new version an “abstinence-only” approach to discussing racism, while others have heralded the arrival of the politically correct apocalypse, the point of no return for liberal thought police.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” says Gribben, an Aubern University professor who has been vilified by both the left and right. “Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.” But he isn’t here and he can’t answer for himself. Maybe Twain would have screamed in indignation that his work was being robbed of its original meaning.
Gribben, a likeable straight talker, is adamant that he is not robbing Twain of anything, merely making a small change so that English teachers are no longer embarrassed to read out loud in class.
But should literature really be changed to avoid the blushes of English teachers? For a cut-and-paste digital generation, is literature just another mash-up that can be altered to suit demand? “I sincerely hope not because it would be very, very bad for American literature,” says Randall L Kennedy, who is probably the world’s greatest expert on the N word (he never uses such euphemisms), having written a widely discussed social history book called Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Kennedy, an American law professor at Harvard University, is among a large group of black commentators who denounced Gribben this week.
“It’s a profoundly bad idea,” he says. “The word ‘nigger’ appears in the autobiography of Malcolm X, should that be removed as well?” But it’s not the same thing, is it? Mark Twain was white, Malcolm X was not, the context is very different.
Kennedy sighs. “No, I really don’t think so. If the word is hurtful and contemptuous, then it ought to be condemned no matter who is speaking.”
I wonder if there isn’t a certain power play going on here. A white professor wants the word removed because it makes him squirm, a black professor wants it included. Isn’t that squirming a form of social control over white people? A way of keeping them forever awkward and eager to please? “Now that’s an interesting argument,” says Kennedy.
“By removing the word from Mark Twain, we are losing the opportunity to discuss. If I was an English teacher, I would relish the opportunity to talk about my own feelings and open the discussion to the classroom. Now that’s having a real argument, that’s showing your students respect.”
I wondered what other black people thought of the N word and whether removing it from Twain would help bury a painful past or save white America from confronting its own history. I was pondering all on the subway on the way home when I heard two black teenagers talking. “Hey nigga, what’s up with you?” said one. The reply was instant “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me nigga, something wrong with you though.”
Enter white Irish reporter with a copy of Huckleberry Finn and a massive avalanche of awkwardness. I stutter through an explanation of my article and show them a few of Mark Twain’s offending passages.
The first, 17-year-old Laurence Johnson, picks up the book, studies it for a moment and shuts it suddenly.
“So he said ‘nigger’. So what? People think slave owners called us African-Americans?” he says loudly. His friend laughs, so do some middle-aged black women sitting nearby, all of whom nod in agreement. Johnson, who is in his final year of high school in Brooklyn, puts himself in the place of a slave owner counting his slaves.
“One, two, three, four . . . damn, we got an African-American escaped up north!”
More laughter, some of the women are clapping their hands. “It’s about the timing,” says one of them, Katicha Spencer, a 42-year-old dental nurse from Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. “If some white person said that word to me, I’d be mad as hell. But if it’s from 100 years ago, and it’s someone trying to get the flavour of what people are saying, then that’s what people said. You can’t sugarcoat the past of this country, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.” Her friends nod in agreement. “Mark Twain’s alright,” says one. “He’s not my boss.” Katicha gives her a high five and they laugh as they leave the train.
I wondered what artists who had to read racist lines thought about this type of censorship.
One who should know is Tony nominee Kelli O’Hara, star of the musical South Pacific, which is touring the US. This current controversial performance is faithful to the words of James Michener, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific and who explored themes of racism, including a line where the heroine wonders if she can marry a man who has black children.
“Basically, any line in the original that made us shudder, we included,” says O’Hara. “If you don’t stick to the original intent of the art, then what are you doing? Serving up easy comedy while glossing over the racism of the time? Go back to the book and see what it says, see what Twain or Michener are saying about race.”
“Of course I understand those arguments,” says Suzanne La Rosa, co-founder of NewSouth, the company that is releasing the new racially sensitive Mark Twain. Prof Gribben is “a man of pure heart” who came up with a brilliant idea and NewSouth rushed to it, she says.
“I think it was about five minutes after his presentation that we went: ‘Oh my God, let’s do it. If we can get these great books to a wider audience with a gentler Twain, then the heck with it, I’ll do it’.”
La Rosa does not shy away from admitting that there are commercial concerns behind the new “gentler” Twain lite. “Of course, if we can get his book back into American schools, that would be really great for a small publishing company like ours.”
Her greatest motivation, she insists, is bringing Twain to people who would not otherwise read his work. “So we remove an offensive word that has a different context today than it did when he wrote it. The fact that we are having this debate at all shows just how explosive that word remains today.”
That was a great read...thanks for that. And from the Irish Times???? The on-the-spot social experiment/research on the train was awesome.
Re-writing history is an awful idea via offensive words or trying to make up for the past is ignorant. Move forward, grow and build.that's how we learn and progress. Constantly going back to mold the past into something it was not is merely skewing the future minds into a false sense of reality and before you know, there is no reality.. just re-writes of what should have been.
CONservative governMENt
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
This is a type of political correctness I have no tolerance for. This is a time when there seems to be less overall sensitivity to the word (as evidenced by its commonplace usage in non-derogatory ways) than there has been in recent memory. While I don't mind people taking away the power the word once held over them or stripping it of its former common meaning, but I do not think that we should be censoring it out of history or literary works. We are quite capable of acknowledging mistakes of the past, but trying to delete them from history and historical works is just absurd.
Its a book of that time.
In those times the word was commonly used
the intolerence behind that word shows through.
So if we remove the book or remove the word what good does that do.
when I read it I was not happy with it, made me angry feel ashamed etc BUT
and its a Big arsed but
Me being not happy about it is THE GOOD THING
we as a society now KNow that its not good
WE have learned, we have evolved our thinking on all the colours of skin in the world N( WELL MOST HAVE)
so having these books and their words shows the difference.
shows how we have changed
I reckon it should be read in schools, then discussions on the text. these words
isnt that what schools are for,
Comments
Should Huck Finn get a 21st-century revision?
SEÁN O'DRISCOLL, The Irish Times
The word ‘nigger’ has been replaced by ‘slave’ in one US publisher’s new versions of Mark Twain’s classic novels – but should texts really be sanitised?
SITTING AT his desk in Montgomery, Alabama, Prof Alan Gribben is weathering a storm he knew was coming. “Of course there was going to be trouble,” he says with a shrug. “You don’t change Mark Twain and not expect the walls to come crashing down.”
This week, an Alabama publishing company, NewSouth, announced it will be releasing Gribben’s altered version of Mark Twain’s classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , in which the word “nigger” is replaced with “slave”, while the word “injun” is replaced by “Indian”.
It’s the removal of the first word (used 219 times in Huckleberry Finn ) that has cultural commentators frothing with outrage this week. Some have called the new version an “abstinence-only” approach to discussing racism, while others have heralded the arrival of the politically correct apocalypse, the point of no return for liberal thought police.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” says Gribben, an Aubern University professor who has been vilified by both the left and right. “Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.” But he isn’t here and he can’t answer for himself. Maybe Twain would have screamed in indignation that his work was being robbed of its original meaning.
Gribben, a likeable straight talker, is adamant that he is not robbing Twain of anything, merely making a small change so that English teachers are no longer embarrassed to read out loud in class.
But should literature really be changed to avoid the blushes of English teachers? For a cut-and-paste digital generation, is literature just another mash-up that can be altered to suit demand? “I sincerely hope not because it would be very, very bad for American literature,” says Randall L Kennedy, who is probably the world’s greatest expert on the N word (he never uses such euphemisms), having written a widely discussed social history book called Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
Kennedy, an American law professor at Harvard University, is among a large group of black commentators who denounced Gribben this week.
“It’s a profoundly bad idea,” he says. “The word ‘nigger’ appears in the autobiography of Malcolm X, should that be removed as well?” But it’s not the same thing, is it? Mark Twain was white, Malcolm X was not, the context is very different.
Kennedy sighs. “No, I really don’t think so. If the word is hurtful and contemptuous, then it ought to be condemned no matter who is speaking.”
I wonder if there isn’t a certain power play going on here. A white professor wants the word removed because it makes him squirm, a black professor wants it included. Isn’t that squirming a form of social control over white people? A way of keeping them forever awkward and eager to please? “Now that’s an interesting argument,” says Kennedy.
“By removing the word from Mark Twain, we are losing the opportunity to discuss. If I was an English teacher, I would relish the opportunity to talk about my own feelings and open the discussion to the classroom. Now that’s having a real argument, that’s showing your students respect.”
I wondered what other black people thought of the N word and whether removing it from Twain would help bury a painful past or save white America from confronting its own history. I was pondering all on the subway on the way home when I heard two black teenagers talking. “Hey nigga, what’s up with you?” said one. The reply was instant “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me nigga, something wrong with you though.”
Enter white Irish reporter with a copy of Huckleberry Finn and a massive avalanche of awkwardness. I stutter through an explanation of my article and show them a few of Mark Twain’s offending passages.
The first, 17-year-old Laurence Johnson, picks up the book, studies it for a moment and shuts it suddenly.
“So he said ‘nigger’. So what? People think slave owners called us African-Americans?” he says loudly. His friend laughs, so do some middle-aged black women sitting nearby, all of whom nod in agreement. Johnson, who is in his final year of high school in Brooklyn, puts himself in the place of a slave owner counting his slaves.
“One, two, three, four . . . damn, we got an African-American escaped up north!”
More laughter, some of the women are clapping their hands. “It’s about the timing,” says one of them, Katicha Spencer, a 42-year-old dental nurse from Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. “If some white person said that word to me, I’d be mad as hell. But if it’s from 100 years ago, and it’s someone trying to get the flavour of what people are saying, then that’s what people said. You can’t sugarcoat the past of this country, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.” Her friends nod in agreement. “Mark Twain’s alright,” says one. “He’s not my boss.” Katicha gives her a high five and they laugh as they leave the train.
I wondered what artists who had to read racist lines thought about this type of censorship.
One who should know is Tony nominee Kelli O’Hara, star of the musical South Pacific, which is touring the US. This current controversial performance is faithful to the words of James Michener, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific and who explored themes of racism, including a line where the heroine wonders if she can marry a man who has black children.
“Basically, any line in the original that made us shudder, we included,” says O’Hara. “If you don’t stick to the original intent of the art, then what are you doing? Serving up easy comedy while glossing over the racism of the time? Go back to the book and see what it says, see what Twain or Michener are saying about race.”
“Of course I understand those arguments,” says Suzanne La Rosa, co-founder of NewSouth, the company that is releasing the new racially sensitive Mark Twain. Prof Gribben is “a man of pure heart” who came up with a brilliant idea and NewSouth rushed to it, she says.
“I think it was about five minutes after his presentation that we went: ‘Oh my God, let’s do it. If we can get these great books to a wider audience with a gentler Twain, then the heck with it, I’ll do it’.”
La Rosa does not shy away from admitting that there are commercial concerns behind the new “gentler” Twain lite. “Of course, if we can get his book back into American schools, that would be really great for a small publishing company like ours.”
Her greatest motivation, she insists, is bringing Twain to people who would not otherwise read his work. “So we remove an offensive word that has a different context today than it did when he wrote it. The fact that we are having this debate at all shows just how explosive that word remains today.”
96: Cork, Dublin
00: Dublin
06: London, Dublin
07: London, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
09: Manchester, London
10: Dublin, Belfast, London & Berlin
11: San José
12: Isle of Wight, Copenhagen, Ed in Manchester & London x2
Thanks for coming, Cosmo. No doubt, see you soon.
...signed...the token black Pearl Jam fan.
FaceSpace
Well that says a lot.
...signed...the token black Pearl Jam fan.
FaceSpace
That was a great read...thanks for that. And from the Irish Times???? The on-the-spot social experiment/research on the train was awesome.
...signed...the token black Pearl Jam fan.
FaceSpace
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
The sign of a world truly gone mad
...signed...the token black Pearl Jam fan.
FaceSpace
In those times the word was commonly used
the intolerence behind that word shows through.
So if we remove the book or remove the word what good does that do.
when I read it I was not happy with it, made me angry feel ashamed etc BUT
and its a Big arsed but
Me being not happy about it is THE GOOD THING
we as a society now KNow that its not good
WE have learned, we have evolved our thinking on all the colours of skin in the world N( WELL MOST HAVE)
so having these books and their words shows the difference.
shows how we have changed
I reckon it should be read in schools, then discussions on the text. these words
isnt that what schools are for,
:thumbup: