If ever there was need to demonstrate the willingness of some Americans to downplay their country’s undeniably racist history, this latest act of cultural revisionism should suffice. Fearing “pre-emptive censorship” at the hands of readers deemed too sensitive to make “textual encounters with this racial appellative”, the Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben has put together a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word “nigger” with the supposedly less “demeaning” term “slave”. Its publisher, NewSouth Books, has uploaded on its site an excerpt from Gribben’s introduction, in which he explains: “We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers.”
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