Has the concept of censorship gone astray? How to operationalize muddy waters? Half a century of censorship in Portugal

Abstract

ABSTRACT Censorship studies are currently facing an important conceptual change towards enlarging the phenomena deemed to be censorial (class, race, gender), while risking losing sight of the conceptual specificity of what censorship means. If everything is censorship, then the concept loses explanatory power, but if we restrict the concept it fails to account for the multiple forms censorship takes to be powerful. By mapping censorship studies about the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974), we propose an overreaching framework to study the censorship phenomenon in general that articulates its institutional-regulatory and socio-structural dimensions. This articulation enables us to understand the dynamics, productivity and mutations of the regulatory dimension, without losing the conceptual specificity of censorship by assuming that only when this dimension manifests itself can structural constraints be considered part of the censorship process. This framework allows to identify which scientific areas, their preferential objects and methodologies, facilitate an articulated approach to censorship.