Literary censorship for children and youth and lawfare in “democratic times”

Abstract

The article problematizes the intensification of censorship movements in Brazil in relation to literary education for children and youth, particularly in schools and on the recent processes of offering and choosing works by the PNLD (National Book and Teaching Material Program), considering the rise of transnational alt rights and their regressive agendas in the field of culture, education and rights (lawfare). The manuscript, of a cartographic theoretical-methodological nature, exemplifies and analyzes some of the motivations for the censorship, through critical studies of childhood, as well as on alt right-wing politics and their social/cultural impacts. The work highlights the increasing weakening of the human right of children, adolescents and young people to democratic education, information and free participation in cultural and artistic life, as recommended by the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Unicef, 1989) and the Statute of Child and Adolescent (Brazil, 1990), while highlighting some counter-hegemonic fronts of action, centralizing the role and mediations of literary reading.