Let's leave aside the question of whether censorship is a bad thing. I think most of us agree that it is. Those of us who oppose censorship would naturally object to what has been done on that ground alone, even if we believed that the changes to the book somehow brought about an improvement in the text or cured a literary defect. But leaving aside censorship, do the suggested changes make any sense at all? Would a book in which Nazis scream "Kill the kikes!" be improved if the Nazis screamed instead, "Kill those gentlemen of Judaic persuasion!"?
We shouldn't pretend that this edition is being promoted because the editors want the book not to be offensive to African Americans. It's hard to imagine a book that is more anti-slavery, and more attuned to the humanity of slaves and the horror of slavery than
Huckleberry Finn. Huck is just like all his neighbors when the book starts, fully embracing slavery and never considering slaves to be true human beings, but by the end of the book he movingly rises above these attitudes and, by his own reckoning, chooses to go to hell rather than let Jim return to slavery. If you sugar-coat the world Huck lives in, and the way he and everyone else spoke and thought, then you are minimizing the grandeur and power of Huck's evolution, and the anti-slavery, pro-human themes of the book become diluted.
The name of the press, "New South," provides a hint to what the publisher's intentions probably are, beyond, of course, making money by catering to what I presume must be a market big enough to provide financial temptation. As I'm sure we've all read about from time to time, there are textbooks being marketed in the South these days that discuss the entire Civil War without so much as mentioning slavery, and states like South Carolina are planning official celebrations of the Confederacy and the principled heroism of those who died trying to destroy the Union so they could continue to enslave other human beings. To such people, portraying slave owners and other white people in the South as having actually used the n-word would be an insult to the warm and fuzzy revisionism they are promoting, and to me it is clear that the sensitivies being protected by the expungement of the n-word are those of white Southerners and not African Americans.
Recall, as well, the "Explanatory" note that Twain prints immediately before the first page of his novel:
Quote:
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
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Shouldn't that count for something?
PS-- I just looked at their catalog, and to my surprise they seem to feature many books celebrating African Americans and civil rights. This doesn't affect my view of the Huck Finn matter, though.