Noah Coco '26
Managing Editor
From September 19th through the 20th, the University of Virginia’s Sound Justice Lab hosted a conference titled “Technologies of Silence.” The two-day multidisciplinary conference featured panels of speakers and performances by artists exploring the legal technologies and tactics used to silence stories, individuals, and groups.
On Thursday, September 19, the conference convened a panel at the Law School titled “Banned Books, Tabooed Art, Unspeakable Subjects.” The panel featured moderator Amy Woolard ’08, Breanna Diaz, Andrea Dennis, Mame-Fatou Niang, and Paul Halliday.
The unifying theme of the speakers’ remarks was the socio-legal mechanisms through which dominant cultures have suppressed, erased, or weaponized information, experiences, and creative expression of marginalized communities—particularly people of color and the LGBTQ community.
Sound Justice Lab Co-Director, Professor Anne Coughlin, briefly introduced the panel and offered a tribute to the late Professor Frederick Schauer, who was originally scheduled to participate in the discussion. Following Professor Coughlin’s remarks, Woolard, Chief Program Officer at the ACLU of Virginia, spoke to frame the discussion.
She articulated the process by which ideals adopted by the dominant culture inform societal norms and taboos. Through the inherent power embodied by such a position, these norms manifest through laws that govern society. The active suppression of information and experiences by such socio-legal mechanisms as book bans, therefore, “don’t happen in a vacuum, and they leave wake,” commented Woolard. Rather, she described the use of such socio-legal tools as part of a designed and coordinated attempt to “block out information and experiences” and “paralyze and chill stewards of that information and those experiences.”
Book bans, said Diaz, Policy and Legislative Counsel at the ACLU of Virginia, make up the “sad majority” of her work. She proceeded to describe the nationwide “coordinated attack” on school curriculums and community and school libraries. Although cloaked in a nominal effort to protect students and the public from harmful rhetoric—sexually explicit content, obscenity, pornography, etc.—in practice, these efforts primarily target books about, and authored by, people of color and LGBTQ people. Rather than the putative goal of protecting the public from the dissemination of harmful rhetoric, the real goal motivating these efforts, Diaz alleged, is to “erase [their] historical contributions and experiences from classrooms and the public generally.”
On the ground, this “coordinated attack” has materialized through efforts to regulate school policies around the selection and removal of materials, pro-book ban and classroom censorship campaigns, and efforts to remove school and public library staff or board members. Most of these efforts are concentrated in five states: Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and Pennsylvania.
Virginia, too, has been the site of active campaigns to censor content. In 2022, for example, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order Number One banned instruction in “inherently divisive concepts,” which includes critical race theory. That same year, SB 656 was signed into law, requiring the Virginia Department of Education to develop, and local school boards to adopt, model policies ensuring parental notification of curricula including sexually explicit content and allowances for parents to opt out of instruction of such materials to their children. Diaz noted, however, that parents in Virginia always had similar opt-out rights. Instead, she explained, this bill intentionally targeted specific content from racial and LGBTQ communities and has already been used as a premise for the removal of books from school libraries.
Halliday, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, spoke about various manifestations of book bans and book burnings throughout the history of the British Empire. He began with the burnings ordered by King Henry IV of the philosopher John Wycliffe’s books at the turn of the fifteenth century for their allegedly heretical doctrines of Catholic theology. Halliday proceeded to the 1634 order to burn William Prynne’s Histriomatrix—a screed against the immorality of contemporary theater viewed, in part, to directly implicate the Queen—in front of Prynne in a public setting. In both of these accounts, Halliday noted, divine authority was asserted, in part, as justification to burn the books.
Halliday also noted, however, that this precursor to the book ban, as well as the modern form of the book ban itself, bestowed no inherent authority upon the suppressors. Instead, the authors’ ideas persisted through dissemination by the original audience and readers of the proscribed content. Despite the heavy hand of authority, the survival of these ideas depended on the traction they gained among contemporary audiences and the democratic process of dissemination among the public. It is “not the ideas that were burned,” said Halliday, only their physical publications.[1]
Dennis, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Georgia School of Law, examined an analogous socio-legal mechanism in her remarks: the use and misuse of rap music in criminal procedures. She traced this history back to the antebellum slave code prohibitions on reading, writing, and drumming; the use of the criminal process in the 1930s to harass and investigate jazz musicians who expressed social critiques through their music; all the way to the targeting of black artists and civil rights activists under the guise of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program in the 1960s.
The suppression of black creative voices has manifested in recent decades, in part, through the criminal prosecution of rap artists for the communication of threats through their lyrics. “Creative expression has become a means and instrumentality of crime” under the law, said Dennis. Compounding these efforts at suppression is the continued silencing of incarcerated artists, and the delicate strategic decision of whether to testify during trial. “We are not hearing from those held behind bars,” said Dennis, and the hesitation to testify in one’s own defense deprives those same artists of the “opportunity to defend their art and provide an explanation for their creative process.” Posed with the question of whether the use of rap lyrics should be banned from the criminal legal process, Dennis expressed ambivalence. “Should we be proposing silence as a solution to the problem?”
Niang, Director of the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon University and Artist-in-Residence at the Ateliers Médicis in Paris, began her remarks with a provocative statement: “I am an unspeakable subject as a French black person.” By that statement, she meant that the story of slavery and black people in France has been erased from France’s history and culture. Race has been formally removed from official documents; there is no word for “blackness” in the French language; and French history is taught in schools without any reference to slavery beyond that which had happened in the United States.
What is most striking about this omission, for Niang, is the unifying role of history as “the backbone of French national identity.” “Nothing explains how I got here,” she said. The lack of language and vocabulary to talk about the black French experience suppresses this identity and personal expression. The twin tools of history and language cohere to erase these stories from the public consciousness. Artists like Niang are working to fill this void with creative projects to give voice to these stories and identities, including her most recent work, “Sounds of Silence,” a “sound tapestry” to preserve and promote the lived experiences of one particular community in France.
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ebj6gs@virginia.edu
[1] Much credit is owed to Julia Sabek ’26 for graciously taking notes during Professor Halliday’s discussion because I had to leave early.