Censorship as Catalyst for Artistic Innovation

One kind of government-supported censorship of the arts targets not the expressive content of any particular artwork but instead seeks to suppress the activity of a group of people based on some feature of the group’s human identity such as race, gender or class. Using examples from the history of the development of black music in the United States that followed from the legal oppression of slavery and from evidence of changes in the Punjabi theatre in Pakistan following state-sanctioned suppressions of women this paper demonstrates that human-identity-related arts censorship not only harms but can actually serve to spur and enhance, rather than suppress, artistic innovation