Dua Lipa's 'Banned' Books Are a Joke

[00:00:00]So, Dua Lipa, the popular singer, has come out with a list of 100 banned books. Now, I'm going to talk about why they're obviously not really banned, but also what her list says about the decline of literature and how we've gone from the great era of literature to this strange contemporary era we find ourselves in. So, stick around because it's a quite subtle argument that I think some of you will enjoy. So, Dua Lipa is a pop star, of course, and she's come out with this list of 100 books which are going to be placed in the Lello bookshop in Porto. It's a famous bookshop and it's the manifesto library it's being called because these are supposed to be manifestos of freedom, we're told. Now, as soon as I heard this, of course, I knew immediately, straight away, these are not going to be banned books. Why? One, because it's almost a tautology to say if you can get these books and stock an entire library with them with no trouble at all, of course, they are, by their nature, not banned. Number two, I don't think anyone expected Dua Lipa to come out with anything actually controversial. She's not going to suddenly obliterate her entire career by coming out with, you know, the Dua Lipa David Irving collection or whatever it is. Whoever's the most controversial person you can think of, she's not going to have them.

[00:01:09]She's not going to have anyone actually controversial. We know this.

[00:01:12]And thirdly, if you've ever seen these lists of banned books, these sections in things like Waterstones, they're never actually controversial. They're basically classics like 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and so on. And indeed, those two books are in this list, which I knew they would be.

[00:01:27]And that doesn't mean these are bad books, of course. It just means we knew they wouldn't be banned. So, firstly, we see that's immediately the case. They're not banned, they're just classics that at one point were controversial for one reason or another. Maybe they criticized totalitarianism, maybe they were published in a hostile environment like Milan Kundera's work, which is also in there.

[00:01:46]So, at one point they were, in a sense, banned. Now, they say that they're not all literally banned and that they're just the kind of works that challenge power and so on. So, that's fair enough.

[00:01:55]I'm not expecting more to be literally banned. My problem with it is a little bit more subtle. So, what Dua Lipa or whoever's helped her with this list tries to do with these 100 books is create a kind of straight line between classics like 1984 or even Catcher in the Rye, which is in there, and modern books that are essentially ideological, basically activism posing as literature.

[00:02:19]So, in in the section that's called voice, which we're told is about voices that have risen up against uh oppression. Let me just get the exact wording for you. This category amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalized, excluded, or underrepresented. These works reclaim space, visibility, and narrative authority through questions of race, gender, identity, geography, and belonging. Okay, so in this list of voice books, there's different sections. There's control, there's voice.

[00:02:51]And in voice, we have J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. So, you go, "Okay, that's interesting." Great book, obviously. And we have Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, another classic. But then it goes into books like Decolonizing the Mind from Ngugi. I never know how to pronounce his name, sorry. And then it goes into things like Gender Queer by Kevabi. Is that how you say it? Which is a sort of uh coming of age about someone realizing they're non-binary.

[00:03:17]And there's books on things like anti-racism. So, there's a book called Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi. He's known as a sort of radical political figure.

[00:03:28]So, my problem here is what we have is the genuinely daring, bold era of basically individual genius, merit, things like this, individual expression, great literature like, for example, Catcher in the Rye.

[00:03:43]But anyone who's followed publishing recently knows there is zero chance that Catcher in the Rye or its equivalent would get published today. The Salinger of today would not even be allowed into the publishing world one on grounds of being a white man, which even people like Ross Barkan admit who is friends with Mamdani. So, this is not a sort of conservative talking point. This is just how it's been in the industry.

[00:04:06]So, you couldn't get published if you were a white man. And they would say something like we've heard that story before. This is the narcissistic ramblings of a privileged white man like Salinger. And if you just look for example that um I found this from a literally agent online this list of things that she's not interested in receiving. And one of them was unchallenged fatphobia. There was unchallenged diet culture, dated ideals of partnership relationships, femininity, and masculinity. Romance containing sexual acts without some form of understood consent verbal or otherwise.

[00:04:38]Very strange list. Conservative or conservative-leaning books. And it goes on and on. So, not as if I was looking for books that had non-consensual sexual acts by the way. I'm not a complete beta. I've never thought about that question.

[00:04:51]But it was very strange. There was a whole list of things you weren't allowed. I noticed immediately that some of the things like suicide ideation was off her list, which gets rid of Michel Houellebecq's Submission, one of the great contemporary novels.

[00:05:03]And eating disorders was off the list, which is really strange cuz Ben Lerner's The Topeka School was a sort of book celebrated by the literary world. He's a sort of literary darling of the moment. That has an eating disorder in it, so that wouldn't be allowed. So, we have these increasingly absurd list of criteria that publishers are looking for. And people like Salinger with a conventional narrative like Catcher in the Rye about a white male experience would never get anywhere near. So, it's dishonest to try and create this linear progression from that era of literature to this ideological era, which is about conformity in my opinion and really oppression rather than freedom.

[00:05:42]And you know, there are different schools of thought on this politically.

[00:05:45]There are post-liberal thinkers who say "Actually, this this era that we could call liberalism already had it baked into its inherent logic its sort of decline into the woke era, if you want a better term." Whereas, people like Andrew Doyle, for example, will say, "No, no, woke was a hard break with liberalism and it's completely different and it's something that threatens liberalism from the outside." So, people have different views on this, but what Leeper really has is a version of the first view, but casting it in a positive light. So, what she's trying to say is, these books belong with these books in the same canon, in the same curated library, and are the same thing doing similar things. And therefore, it was a good thing. So, she's saying the same as some of the post-liberal thinkers, except with the very important twist that they're saying it's a bad thing.

[00:06:32]She's saying it's a good thing. She's saying, "Yes, you can go from 1984 and Catcher in the Rye to Gender Queer and books on that so-called anti-racism and so on."

[00:06:42]I say it's a very, very different thing and it's a very different era that prizes ideological conformity over individual expression and it's why we don't see such great works today. And of course, she includes The Handmaid's Tale, which in a way is the perfect symbol for the entire list, because what do we see in The Handmaid's Tale? We see a hypothetical dystopia, of course, where there's a Christian patriarchy in America. And the problem with this is there are very real patriarchies that are very oppressive right now in the world happening today. Try Afghanistan, for example. But but Atwood is not critiquing this. She has this imaginary Christian world. And I know it's a a novel. I know dystopia is a a form and that's perfectly reasonable, but I'm saying it's a kind of a straw man to invent this enemy who you then attack.

[00:07:28]And I think that's what this list does.

[00:07:29]It likes to seem cool and banned. It understands there's a cachet associated one with banned books, cuz it just seems cool and edgy. But two, with the era of great literature. And it wants to harness that energy to bolster this very different ideology that we have now. And that's what I object to about this whole list.

[00:07:50]Now, there is one crucial exception in the whole list that actually is a brave choice, and that is Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. There's no doubt that this is a banned book. Rushdie had a fatwa against him for writing it, and even in 2022, of course, he was horrifically stabbed as a result of this book. So, it's still a dangerous book.

[00:08:08]The threat has never gone away.

[00:08:09]Therefore, including it is actually brave cuz that is actually a banned book that is controversial.

[00:08:15]And my theory here is that this book and Rushdie and the sort of situation Rushdie is in lies on the fault line between two worldviews. There's the old liberal worldview that said, "Hang on, this is terrible. It's terrible what's happening to Salman Rushdie. We must defend him." And then what started to happen was voices emerged saying, "Well, actually, Rushdie should just kind of shut up." There was a Liberal Democrat in Britain who quite famously said this on a popular television program here, Question Time, and and Christopher Hitchens made the case for Salman Rushdie, the late Christopher Hitchens.

[00:08:47]And and so, this this fault line started to emerge, and I wonder here if, perhaps cuz this is Portugal, they just haven't got the memo. You know how Michel Houellebecq can still be a literary star in France despite being very controversial. Sometimes I think the Anglosphere is a little bit more insane than Europe on some of these questions.

[00:09:06]So, it may be that it's Portugal or whoever helped Dua Lipa with the list or Dua Lipa herself didn't notice this tension. But actually, whether it's deliberate or not, that is the one brave choice in the list cuz that is a genuinely edgy book, as we clearly see from Rushdie having to have 24-hour security for for his entire life ever since the fatwa and actually getting stabbed in in 2022 tragically.

[00:09:29]And there are other figures in the list.

[00:09:30]I think it's somewhat hypocritical to include William Burroughs, which certainly be canceled today because he had many controversial views, and of course, he did shoot his wife in the head accidentally, so probably be in prison, but he'd also be canceled. There are very controversial writers on the list who just wouldn't be welcome in the literary culture of today. In fact, I'd say most of them wouldn't. So, I resent this attempt to harness the great works of the past of that great era of literature and use them to create a sort of false continuum with the current situation. So, Dua Lipa doesn't look like she eats much cake, which is to her credit, but here she is trying to have her cake and eat it because you either celebrate beauty, individual expression, and artistic risk, or so-called identity, ideological conformity, and activism posing as literature, which I submit is what we have now. So, you've got to pick, Dua. You can't have both.

[00:10:24]Those are my thoughts. Go to nickreads.com, which is my new Substack associated with this channel where I'll be putting up essays, and later we'll have a book club on there if you're interested in that. So, nickreads.com is going to be the companion Substack to this YouTube channel. And also, like and subscribe, and I'll see you very soon.