International pop star Dua Lipa, of “Don’t Start Now” fame, recently opened a library of restricted and censored books in Porto, Portugal. The collection features a curated list of roughly 100 books and was organized to coincide with the historic Livraria Lello Bookstore’s 120th anniversary. Though generally praised by the press, scores of internet commentators have harshly panned Dua Lipa’s library, chalking it up to a hollow performative virtue signal. It appears that many critics have sorely missed the point.
Named the “Manifesto Library,” the books are divided among the four themes of “control, voice, memory and power,” including best sellers such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and lesser-known, but arguably more controversial works such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Much of the criticism is directed at the books that made the cut, which can be viewed here. Many commentators made the snarky point that you can buy all of the books in the library right now on Amazon. Others have said that “Out of these 100 books, about 15 of them were required reading for me in middle school and high school.”
Responding to a publicity image where Dua Lipa is holding The Handmaid’s Tale, John Carney on Twitter writes, “The ‘banned book’ she’s holding was not only a 6 season series on Hulu, owned by the biggest media companies in history, it also spawned a young adult spinoff series.”
An article published by the National Review sarcastically says, “Funnily enough, those ‘banned or censored’ books are easily purchased today.” The title of a clip from the Michael Knowles show incorrectly claims that “none” of the banned books are “actually banned.”
Critics have thus resigned themselves to the conclusion that the library is fruitless performative jockeying, or, as one magazine’s subtitle reads, “If transgression is fun and easy, it is probably not transgressive.”
I do sometimes share a bit of an allergy to celebrity activism, which too often amounts to “slopulist” social media content. But the collective eyeroll over the Dua Lipa book list overlooks the situation. For starters, it’s not a list of currently banned books in the United States, nor has it ever claimed to be. As abundantly stressed in the library’s marketing, the collection includes works that were targets of censorship or restriction in one form or another. This could range from The Handmaid’s Tale, removed from high school libraries in Virginia as recently as 2023, to 1984, banned in the USSR before its collapse, to Wild Swans, still banned today in China. Whether or not the book catalog is legal or accessible in the United States is just as irrelevant to the point as saying that the books burned in Nazi Germany could be found in British bookstores. The attempt at suppression is the key.
These criticisms also lack an appreciation for how the library serves as something of a snapshot of what governments have tried to pull off over time. Though far from a clean track record, the United States has been more hesitant to ban publications than other countries. But that has not been the case everywhere and the library is a fine opportunity to learn that other countries do indeed ban literature and why. Even for American audiences, it’s an opportunity to learn that books such as Naked Lunch, while not outright banned in the country, were restricted by the government through federal Comstock laws. The fact that these books were challenged is worth documenting.
Secondly, critics point out that the book list is politically skewed, characterizing it as something stereotypical of a first-year gender studies class reading list. As others have noted, the Bible is the most restricted and censored book in history. Where is it? The lack of the Bible and other religious texts is a fair observation, but it is likely outside the library’s stipulated categorization. Textbooks and other reference material have often been the targets of censorship, but they are likewise absent because, like religious texts, they are not really pop literature. That categorization may be a limitation, but the library was never sold as an exhaustive catalog, and I don’t believe it undermines the endeavor as a whole.
Even if the selection is slanted towards certain pieties, in many ways it beckons to John Stuart Mill’s notion in On Liberty that competing expression is necessary for human flourishing. The fact that these restricted works can be displayed in Portugal is a symbol that censorship didn’t succeed in stamping out the unpopular content. The library, rather than the content of the books are the political message. That’s important. Whatever the flaws of Dua Lipa’s library are, it is a statement in favor of the freedom to read and think without the state’s permission.
