Literary censorship in Western societies is generally associated with right wing politics and morally reactionary groups or institutions. Today, this kind of censorship obviously continues, but a new form of censorship, left wing leaning and heavily relying on moral grounds, had appeared. As an answer to a real problem, namely the lack of diversity and the negative impact of negative representations of minorities, a new form of censorship has appeared, that of the “sensitivity era”, a censorship that has imposed rules on what can or cannot be said and how to say it. Reinforced by psychological mechanisms of moral panic and powered by the rise of social media, the application and control of these rules in the literary and cultural field is so rigid and constraining that it has become a real danger for the free expression of ideas, while unwillingly breeding sympathy for the alt right battle against diversity and sensitivity. Szetela’s book is a wake-up call against the unforeseen but no less effective consequences of what started in the 1980s as the canon wars and a dramatic warning against the deceiving illusion that the current hegemonic position of this kind of censorship in academia (at least in English departments) as well as literary publishing (and not only in the traditionally very delicate field of young adult literature) has real effects in social and political life.

“Sensitivity” is the key word of the book. Whereas diversity refers to the need of opening the field of publishing to non-mainstream voices and the (quantitative) question of “who” is allowed to publish, sensitivity has to do with the (qualitative) perception of how minorities are represented in literary fiction and nonfiction and the question whether this representation respects or distorts these communities. The new literary censorship is then the effort to eradicate “offensive” language, more precisely to “heal” the harmful effects of anything that can hurt a community’s sensitivity, as revealed by the reactions of readers who present themselves as representative of the community’s experience: on the one hand individual readers as well as well-organized opinion leaders, who react to the presence of problematic books, old or new, asking other readers, librarians, teachers, critics, booksellers, or publishers to cancel them; on the other hand “sensitivity readers”, that is chosen of self-promoted individuals claiming to speak in the name of their community and hired by authors as well as publishers to purge not only allegedly or virtually problematic manuscripts even before the stage of publication.

At the end of the road, Szetela argues, the result is a complete disaster: while presenting itself as a form of “healing”, this moral censorship has turned into new forms of thought-control that have nothing to envy to the Salem witch hunts, the 1950s burning of comic books and the subsequent introduction of the Comics Code, or modern forms of totalitarian regimes as described for instance in Orwell’s 1984. At the same time, the permanent fight of left wing voices against other left wing voices, always suspected of being insufficiently sensitive and thus guilty of all kind of moral and political flaws (racism, homophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, fat-shaming, ageism, eurocentrism – the question of “white supremacy” often functioning as het short-cut for all these evils), is so exasperatingly simplistic and intolerant that it ends up creating sympathy for the antiwokism of the right and far-right.

Szetela’s book is both a strong defense of the ideals of diversity and sensitivity and an equally strong condemnation of the ways in which the sensitivity era is destroying them by imposing these new forms of censorship and self-censorship, which the author considers not only counterproductive but extremely dangerous. Yet in the very first place, his study is an attempt to understand how the initial cultural and political ideals of the sensitivity era have morphed into their opposite.

The argumentation goes in three steps. First, Szetela observes a narrow interpretation of the very notion of sensitivity. The reduction is in fact twofold. On the one hand,  the sensitivity era uncritically accepts the dogma of the absolute and unconditional primacy of the “lived experience”, more exactly the lived experience of a given community, which makes that only those who are part of the community are allowed to speak in the name of that community – a crude negation of the power of imagination, that of the authors, but also that of the readers (the days of the Proustian distinction between the biographical author and the “other self” of this author as expressed through her or his writing are long gone and apparently the freedom of the reader to make sense of inextricably ambiguous texts seems a nightmare instead of being an opportunity). On the other hand, the sensitivity era increases the reductive take on the lived community experience by essentializing and dehistoricizing the twin notions of identity and community – authors are supposed to completely coincide with the supposed identity of their community, which is defined as a monolithic and transhistorical given (at the same time the “experience” in question is never really defined, and nobody actually knows how self-designated sensitivity readers are capable of censoring outsiders, including insufficiently sensitive authors of the same community – Szetela gives various examples of black authors being accused of “integrated white supremacy” by more virtuous community members).

The second step appears when the dangerous effects of this narrowing-down of questions of diversity and sensitivity are increased by the mass-hysterical effects of a new form of moral panic as well as the “tech support” (sic) of the social media. The former explains why the difficulty of solving a real problem (and Szetela does not hide that diversity and sensitivity issues point toward real problems) encourages people to search for scapegoats (in this case insensitive books and authors, whose reading is judged “harmful”). The latter makes clear how looking for scapegoats in the public sphere of the internet and the social media pushes all kind of people, not only readers and writers but also authors, librarians, booksellers, critics, publishers, and teachers to howl with the PC wolves, for nobody wants to take the risk to be accused of any form of sensitivity failure and publicly pilloried. Szetela mentions psychological experiments where readers who are informed that the results of their assessments will be publicized in a Facebook article, suddenly judge that Allen Ginsberg, a left wing gay poet, should be considered “homophobic” (see p. 102-103 for a description of the experiment).

The third and decisive step is Szetela’s disclosure of what is cruelly missing in the moral indignation of the sensitivity prophets: class, as if the difference between rich and poor, old money and inherited precarity, in short have and have-nots, has nothing to do with problems of diversity and sensitivity. The current fad of intersectionality, which (rightly) combines various types of social and cultural inequalities, equally ignores the economic dimension of inequality, thus preventing from taking seriously the problems of for example white poverty (one easily sees how certain political parties and movements take benefit from this indifference).

What Szetela is arguing is not new in itself: the excesses of the PC movement, identity politics, and the sensitivity business (for it is also if not in the first place a business), are well-known, or should be well-known to all those working or participating in the field of reading and writing. What makes his line of reasoning so compelling is the combination of two elements: the critical reading of certain political-cultural myths and the force of its documented evidence. First, Szetela frontally debunks certain myths, one should say lies, such as the never contested idea that what benefits to the sensitivity opinion leaders (prestige, power, jobs, contracts, money) “trickles down” to their community, or the equally generally accepted idea that all minorities are equal (the list of minorities is endlessly expanding, but those related to class remain out of the picture). Second, the book is extremely well documented and gives an insight view of what happens behind the closed doors of the publishing industry, thanks to a large series of interviews with authors, editors, (sensitivity) readers, publishers, and censors (the fact that a large number of the interviewees only accepted to talk under the guarantee of complete anonymity and several times refused the interview to be recorded is more than a symptom of the incredible power of the new censorship), but also thanks to the disclosure of publicly available material that is only rarely taken into consideration, such as the unbelievable payments made to “sensitivity readers” or the amazing $ 32,500, “about $ 541 per minute) charged to a public university by an anti-racist “capitalist entrepreneur” (I am quoting Szetela) for a Zoom talk (more details on page 141 of the book, no need to mention here the name of the entrepreneur in question – one can only hope that after reading Szetela’s book he may come to other opinions). Szetela’s quotations from the cancel literature on certain blogs is also highly revealing. It testifies of the fact that hate speech is not a privilege of alt right.

Finally, one should not forget that in the last instance, this book is a work in vibrant praise of literature, that is of reading and writing of books without constraints, open for public discussion in all its aspects, not only in terms of identity, diversity and sensitivity (and Szetela is the last to deny their importance). Readers deserve better than sanitized literature, and they no longer accept to be infantilized by censors who cannot accept that people, and certainly the young adult readers on whom Szetela’s analysis is focusing, want to choose themselves what to read and what to think of it.