Ten Views of Florida is a book I am producing as the 2024/25 Coffey Resident for Book Arts at the University of Florida. The residency "provides an opportunity for a selected artist to access materials from the Special and Area Studies Collections (SASC) at University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries as the impetus for the creation of an editioned artists’ book." My intention in applying for the residency was to produce a book that provided a counter-narrative to the misinformation issuing forth from Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, and his Department of Education. While doing research on the SASC website, I learned about a series of articles that Harriet Beecher Stowe had written, encouraging Northerners to relocate to Florida in the aftermath of the Civil War. The juxtaposition of the Florida DoE's absurd contentions about slavery with a Northern abolitionist making a happy home in Florida felt like a good starting point for my project.
When I arrived in Gainesville last September, I set about looking through the SASC's broad holdings of tourist brochures and pamphlets, from the reconstruction era into the third quarter of the twentieth century. I was pursuing a vague idea of counter-posing Stowe's writings with current statistics about race relations in Florida, all in the guise of tourist graphics. As often happens, my idea began to change as soon as I started my research. Stowe's articles felt too far removed from the current political moment; statistics about inequality too obvious to register an impact. I put them to the side and, instead, concentrated on the content, graphics, and structures of the tourist literature. I took hundreds of pictures, made some sketches, and, when I returned to New York, I let what I had seen rest, untouched in the back of my mind. While looking up statistics about book banning a few months later, Ten Views of Florida quickly came together.
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According to PEN America, there were 10,046 instances of school book banning in the 2023–24 school year. Nearly half of these, 4,561, took place in Florida. In the prior year, there were a mere 3,362 such bans in the entire country. The dramatic increase in 2023 was due in large part to state legislation. Books that had previously been removed from libraries as the result of local lobbying were now mandated to never make it onto the shelves in the first place. The vast majority of these books are banned for treating subjects that conflict with the supposed values of “normal” Americans; people who, if we are to believe the Florida legislature, are immune to doubt, grief, curiosity, and any of the pressures or pleasures of adolescent exploration.
Perhaps the most harmful quality of these book bans is their proposition that there is a clearly-delineated and universally-desirable definition of normalcy. Any child who falls outside its bounds is assumed to be flawed. As if the social pressures of childhood weren’t enough, the State now sees fit, under the guise of “protection,” to pile on, expose, and shame these children for being different. Such a child is bound to internalize this state-sponsored shame, a harm compounded by the fact that any book that might give them some sense of identification has been removed from their school library in order to “protect” them. None of these bans are for the benefit of children. They are designed to make parents feel better and to allow politicians to “own the libs.”
The implicit messaging of “protection” in book bans suggests that if one’s child does not fit within the State’s limited definition of normalcy, the parents are not to blame. Nor is the child’s inherent nature or the kaleidoscope of genetic possibility. No, the blame for the child’s perceived defects rests squarely on the shoulders of nefarious, outside actors. On children’s book authors hell-bent on “making” kids gay, on young adult writers who unblushingly describe real-life sexual and psychological scenarios, or on adult novelists who present a vision of America in which the actions of the ruling cadre are not always hunky-dory for others. It’s “these others” that are the problem, not you, and certainly not your child.
This world view was made clear in a stunning example of doublespeak that the Florida Department of Education issued with this past year’s list of banned books: “There are no books banned in Florida and sexually explicit materials do not belong in schools. Once again, far left activist groups are pushing the book ban hoax on Floridians. The better question is why do these groups continue to fight to expose children to sexually explicit materials. [sic]” So, no books are banned *but* certain books do not belong in schools; this state-issued list of banned books is being used by activists to push the “book ban hoax on Floridians.”
The last sentence of the DoE’s statement is the one that tunnels most deeply into the historical mindset of book banners: “Why do these groups continue to fight to expose children to sexually explicit material?” If “the righteous” is substituted for “children” and “heretical” for “sexually explicit,” we tap into a tradition of othering and demonizing that goes back at least to the early Middle Ages, one that officially continued in the Catholic Church until 1966, the last year they published their index of banned books. Then as now, book banners portray themselves as the embattled victims of corrupting forces.
The concept of book banning relies on a world view in which human experience is flattened to such an extreme as to exist only in the imagination of the self-styled righteous. It presents a litmus test that no honest human can pass. To push these kinds of tests on children, who are already prone to extreme beliefs, can only have a negative effect in the longer term. But I suppose the Florida legislature prefers a society in which it is okay to shoot someone who makes you uncomfortable, over one in which adolescents read about masturbation.
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Most articlesa bout book banning include lists of the prohibited titles. These lists remind me of similar catalogues of classical literature—lost plays, treatises, and histories sorted into columns like the ranks of war dead carved into monuments. Occasionally one of these titles is followed by an asterisk, alerting the reader to the existence of a fragment, some clue to the plot or argument that is all the more frustrating for its lack of illumination. Is this the fate of today’s banned books? Like them, the lost classics were removed from our communal library, either by accident or intention; and although it is currently possible to acquire banned books, the pressures put on their production by a winnowed audience could conceivably hasten their disappearance. Banning is a crucial step in a broader movement of erasure, a whitewashing of the past that is used as a dubious precedent for discriminatory policies.
There is a long history of such practices in Florida. From the post-Civil War period onward, Floridian businesses and municipalities issued innumerable brochures about the good life to be had in the Sunshine State. These pamphlets uniformly advertise prosperity, fun, and/or safety, employing vignettes and Grand Tour-style “views” to back up their claims. From blurred halftones of celery fields to hyper-saturated sunsets, from docile Seminole tourist villages to shiny-toothed families playing beach ball, one thing is certain: Florida is open for business, so long as you are the right kind of person. In the aggregate, these views present a highly-edited picture of a homogenized reality, a similar fantasy land of “Coke and honey” that book banners must see when they look in the mirror.
As I thought about these two forms of cultural editing, the banned book and the scenic view merged in my mind as parallel prompts for contemplation. What kind of view of Florida will these lists of books offer someone in the distant future if the texts themselves are lost? Will they reveal the preoccupations of those who banned them: their obsessions with sex and sexuality, their fear of difference, their lack of worldly experience? Or, deprived of their context, will the titles read as enigmatic clues to unsolvable mysteries? After thinking about this for a while, I realized that I am not far removed from that imagined future reader. I have not read most of the books banned in Florida, even some of the more famous ones. I hadn’t even heard of many of them before the Florida Department of Education brought them to my attention. As for the ones I have heard of, such as The Bluest Eye, their banning has reminded me of the fragility of life. It’s about time I read them.
But before stacking my bedside table with new books, I wanted to engage in a thought experiment. Having not read these books, how would I interpret the information contained in their titles? Beyond Magenta, The Bluest Eye, Rainbow High, Fade, Smoke, etc. They are so evocative, so charged with visual resonance that, disembodied from the books they name, they might easily describe images, rather than provide clues to plot or character. What I see when I read these titles is not a library shelf but a catalogue of views. They bloom in my mind as images, patterns, and colors, composed with no thought to the textual content of the books that inspired them. This indulgence in visual fantasy is its own kind of erasure, but it can be easily corrected by reading the books on whose titles my images are based. There is no guarantee that future readers will have the same opportunity.
