Judge Dennis Davis
To Ban or Not to Ban: Literature, Law and Freedom of Speech
Summary
Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer engage in a conversation on the long history of banning books and censoring speech and debate when it is and is not appropriate, as well as the repercussions it has on larger society.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s an interesting question. I can’t just say, I’ll give you one answer to it and I won’t go further. In South Africa, we now have taken the view that the waving of the old South African flag, it is justifiable to restrict it because it actually incites division and hatred. And that jurisprudence may well extend as far as a confederate flag is concerned.
We are seeing as we speak the threat on democracy all over, I mean, consider United States of America, where even in Arizona now, they’ve proved there could not possibly been a steal of the election, but the propagation of that lie continues. It’s a dreadful problem. You cannot have that kind of discourse prevailing. And that’s why I mentioned Fox News. You cannot have that kind of dominant discourse prevailing in a society and sustained democracy over time. But it’s a much bigger issue about how we think. Again, I suppose it falls outside it.
Absolutely, I mean, otherwise, how are you going to study the history of Nazism if you can’t actually get a hold of a copy of “Mein Kampf”?