Every year since 1982, the American Library Association (ALA) has marked Banned Books Week in late September or early October. This national campaign brings awareness to the various attempts to ban or “challenge” books. Libraries, colleges, schools, and bookstores around the country organize events and make available resources. This year at Stevens, our librarians—Vicky Orlofsky, Romel Espinel, Courtney Walsh, and Linda Beninghove—as well as Professor Lindsey Swindall and I decided to put together an event to highlight the ways these broader ethical and political issues surrounding freedom of expression affect our campus community and the town of Hoboken. Below are a few comments I prepared for that event, in which I address the importance of Hoboken becoming a Book Sanctuary City and the need to keep going in our efforts to make our campus and town a more inclusive community.
“Thank you all for gathering here today to bring awareness to issues of freedom of speech and thought, but also issues of racism, trans- and queerphobia, xenophobia, and the return of a kind of ‘culture war’ mentality that we were beginning to think might have finally receded into the background white noise of American politics and public debate. But as we have seen during the last presidency and in resurgent far-right politics across this country and the world, the concerns of the 1960s and 70s—whether the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, Second Wave Feminism, or Gay Liberation—are still very much our concerns today.
There have been a few developments in Hoboken, in the New York City area, and the world
beyond that have coalesced to form the particular atmosphere that we now find ourselves in.
On the one hand, there is that resurgent politics of fear-mongering, exclusion, and race and gender supremacism. On the other, we see valiant efforts around the country and the world to push back against these forces and tendencies and assert the rights of marginalized and minoritized communities.
One such successful effort has been the Hoboken City Council’s resolution to declare Hoboken a Book Sanctuary City, which the Director of the Hoboken Public Library, Jennie Pu told us about today. This follows in the wake of a previous resolution last year in 2022 making us a “Right-to-Choose” Sanctuary City for abortion access. This summer, the Hoboken Public Library also organized a Pride Month Read-a-Thon, where the mayor Ravi Bhalla, city councilmembers, and others, including myself, read aloud from LGBTQI books that have been banned elsewhere in the country, particularly—but not only—in the State of Florida.
However, whereas Florida politics might be limited in the impact that it has on us in New York, New Jersey, and the other mid-Atlantic states, transphobia and racism are far from an exclusively Southern phenomenon—and, in fact, they never were the sole prerogative of those states south of the Mason-Dixon line. In my own South Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, just over a week ago, on the 23rd of September, our local Brooklyn Public Library
branch was forced to cancel a Drag Story Hour and close after it received a bomb threat. Bigotry and hate aren’t contained by state lines—or national borders, for that matter. Similarly, earlier this year, the Queens Public Library branch in Jackson Heights faced disruptive protests over its Drag Story Hour. Friends of mine from the neighborhood—I lived there before starting at Stevens last Fall—joined in on a counter-protest, and the consensus seemed to be that those taking issue with Drag Story Hour were outsiders to this largely South Asian, Latinx, and queer corner of Queens.
This Fall semester, I’m glad to be teaching what is arguably the first exclusively Queer Studies class here at Stevens, Queer Fiction. While putting up posters for this class around campus, they were the only ones—among many other class posters—mysteriously taken down in a matter of days. After putting them back up, they disappeared again. We never found out who was responsible.
One might think what happens in our libraries, schools, and classes has little to do with more material realities of safety from transphobic, homophobic, and racist violence, or the much more direct consequences of the criminal justice system and the continuously assailed social welfare state. And, while there is certainly some truth to this—humanities professors are not the heroic political activists we sometimes imagine ourselves to be—representation, education, media, and access to information exist on a spectrum alongside other, more material realities. To be able to see yourself in the university curriculum, to have your histories, lived experiences, and the art produced by your communities be taken seriously in the curriculum is the most baseline expectation any and every student is entitled to. These educational and representational victories, such as getting Queer Studies on the curriculum and ensuring access to diverse books in perpetuity here in Hoboken, are crucial. Another milestone-in-the-making is the Gender Studies minor being developed here at Stevens, which will soon open for enrollments. However, our efforts to transform our culture and society for the better should not end at such victories. They happen within a particular context: after years of gentrification, Hoboken has become a relatively wealthy and privileged bubble nestled within the surrounding NYC area. It is unaffordable—many faculty and staff at Stevens cannot afford to live here, let alone most working and middle class New Yorkers and North Jerseyans of color.
Moreover, the language of a Book Sanctuary, while important and laudable, does draw on the much more common parlance of the tradition of Sanctuary Cities, places where undocumented immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers might find safety from deportation practices that return people to war zones, political persecution, state-sanctioned queerphobia, political, gang, and domestic violence, and economic hardship. So, I want to ask: what does it mean for Hoboken to be a book sanctuary, but in practice, a city with limited shelters for people suffering from houselessness, and no significant infrastructure to take in some of our new friends and neighbors from other countries, who are currently forced to sleep on the streets across the river in Midtown Manhattan, or languish in cold, unsanitary, and flooded tents on Randall’s Island in the East River?
Books give us access to diverse experiences and ideas. But so do people. And, as a literature professor, it might be heretical to say this, but what are books without people?
What role do diverse books play in an economically privileged and, according to the 2020 US census, majority white city located in an otherwise much more diverse metropolitan area? Moreover, what does it mean for a Queer Studies class to be inaugurated at Stevens just as the Supreme Court dismantles affirmative action in college admissions? As the Stute recently reported, Stevens will now have to reassess how it accounts for diversity in its recruitment efforts.
I ask these questions not to diminish our achievements, but to remind us that there is much left to be done, and that antiracism and queer rights cannot be achieved without also working towards economic and immigrant justice. In the days after the transgender activist Jennicet Gutiérrez interrupted President Obama at a White House Pride Event in 2015, she spoke to the press about her reasons for doing so. “If the president wants to celebrate with us,” she said, “he should release the LGBTQ immigrants locked up in detention centers immediately.” Similarly, just as Gutiérrez insisted that celebrating Pride at the White House must also translate into concrete action, including releasing queer immigrants from detention, celebrating books by queer people and people of color must also mean making our university and town a place that is truly open and economically accessible to all who want to live and learn here.”
