In the end, there was no dissent. By a unanimous vote, all 10 members of Tennessee’s McMinn Country school board voted in favor of removing Art Spiegelman’s near-universally acclaimed memoir, Maus — the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize — from the district’s 8th grade curriculum.
While the impetus to ban Maus was ostensibly predicated on Spiegelman’s use of vulgarity and nudity to depict his Polish Jewish father’s experience in during World War II — including his having survived the infamous Nazi death camp, Auschwitz — and the intergenerational trauma thereof, minutes from the board’s Jan. 10 debate suggest a broader narrative at play here. Worries that tweens in the year 2022 might be irrevocably harmed by reading “eight curse words and the [nude] picture of the woman” drawn by Spiegelman might be sincere, but belies the context in which this debate takes place — one in which reactionary politicians in multiple levels of state, local, and federal government are purging their communities of vital educational resources based on superficial, and not coincidentally largely right-wing, ideological objections.
