Censura de livros na atualidade: causas, exemplos, consequências e resistências

Abstract

The present work wants to have a critical look over the discussion about how librarians can oppose to book censorship, a subject that it's little debated at Brazilian Scientific Literature, due to the fact of the country had suffered with such issue in different moments of it history, once that the country started as a colony, were books were a luxury for the elite, and that it passed trough two dictatorship moments after become a republic. Book censorship is an action that happens during centuries and can be understood as a way that a dominant group can exercise its power at the same time it attacks another group, usually a minority. We hope that during the development of this monograph we can understand how the scientific literature of Information Science writes about censorship and what informational professionals, such as librarians, are doing to combat censorship, at the end of our research we hope to be able to develop a "anti-censorship" guide for librarians. Even though book censorship is against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Brazilian Constitution, we still were able to compile on this work recent cases of attempts to ban books from the public, and using the scientific literature as a support we will write about how the information professional can deal with such issues. In the recent cases that we listed we were able to notice how the book censorship were giving space to hate speech and dangerous acts against minorities, we also identified that the groups that were asking for books to be banned or censored were using a speech based on the "christian morality" and "good costumes". We also identified that when those cases occurred the growing curiosity of the public towards the books in question, even making the sales of the same books increase.