Art Spiegelman’s cult Holocaust graphic novel has been banned from the curriculum of a school in Tennessee, USA. The highly controversial decision has made many Americans want to discover and discover the work: the comic book tops sales on Amazon US.
It’s a nice snub that the Americans are doing to censorship through Amazon. Mid-January, the decision of an American school to ban the graphic novel on the Holocaust Maus of their school curriculum sparked a lively controversy. In this landmark comic, Art Spiegelman recounts the memories of his Holocaust survivor father and how the Nazis persecuted Jews (represented as cats and mice respectively). A masterful work which was also the first comic to receive a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
Maus tops sales on Amazon US
But on January 10, the board of directors of McMinn County School, located in Tennessee, decided to ban this work from the school curriculum for eighth grade students (the equivalent of our 4th grade). Reason? The presence of eight swear words in the comic strip and a drawing of a naked woman.
A decision denounced by citizens of the region, but also by personalities. ” There is only one type of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they call themselves these days. “, writes thus on Twitter, renowned author Neil Gaiman. The owner of the Knoxville bookstore Nirvana Comics has decided to make the work available free of charge to young people in the region, reveals CNBC. He also launched a GoFundMe campaign to buy more copies to loan out.
School censorshipMcMinn County School had another positive effect: it was so controversial that it finally gave the work a lot of visibility. The complete edition of the work, The Complete Maus, has risen to No. 1 in book sales on Amazon US. The first volume of the work, Maus I A Survivor Recounts: My Father Bleeds History is ranked No. 3 in this ranking on January 31, and the second volume And that’s where the trouble begins in 9th place.
” The school board should have remembered the previous censor of this book, Vladimir Putin: he had banned the Russian edition of Maus in 2015 (…) and the stock of the small publishing house that published it had emptied so quickly that she had to reprint it several times “, says Art Spiegelman to CNBC. As the author summarizes, the Streisand effect has struck again “. The expression “Streisand effect” refers to situations where a strategy aimed at reducing the visibility of something on the Internet will ultimately generate the exact opposite of the desired effect.