E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and the Secret Life of Libel in Colonial Censorship

This article focuses on the careers and literary networks of E. M. Forster and George Orwell to reveal the key role of defamatory libel in censorship of anticolonial texts in the early-twentieth century. Studies of censorship have focused overwhelmingly on the role of obscene libel and seditious libel. These forms are appealing because they are easy to trace through court cases in the archive and because they offer an agential antagonist to the progressive writer in the person of "the censor." There is no censor as such in a defamation case, and yet defamatory libel positively dwarfed these other forms of censorship both in numbers of cases (prosecuted and settled out of court), and in the sense of apprehension it produced among authors and publishers in the period. The essay traces these impacts on Forster and Orwell not only as novelists, but also as public figures trading on their self-described "left-ish" and "anti-imperialist" reputations as legal witnesses and producers for the BBC Eastern Service. It emphasizes the need for a different analytical practice to understand how individual writers and publications negotiated an actively hostile-but also fundamentally unpredictable and nonintegrated-system of proscription: an approach to censorship without censors.