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In this digital age, where we are in a free and democratic society, we have a long history of literary censorship. In an age of unparalleled freedom and free exchange of ideas, free speech faces a grave threat from intolerant religious and cultural groups Censorship in the 20th and 21st century is not as it was practiced in middle-ages imposed by the state machinery, but it is more of a systematic silencing. The present paper discusses the need for artistic freedom, how the artist/ writer must be free to create his own creative world without being bothered by the social norms and standards.

The Nigerian Civil War began on May 30, 1967 when the southeastern provinces declared their independence and Nigeria initiated an unrelenting military campaign to reverse the Biafran secession. The world watched as millions of Biafrans and Nigerians were displaced, starved, raped, slaughtered, and pushed to the very edges of human suffering. Because the conflict officially ended in 1970, too little attention has been paid to addressing and treating the deep macro (social, political) ad micro (local, personal) traumas inflicted by the war. This omission is particularly striking in light of Nigeria's ethnically, regionally, and religiously divided population which remains fraught with the same tensions that triggered the war. The message seems to be that Nigeria has neither forgotten Biafra, nor forgiven.

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief "awakening" followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.