Are Book Burners Always Villains?

I still vividly recall the CBC World at Six report on the 2011 event that was scheduled to occur in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. The report was on a planned burning of Lawrence Hill’s enormously popular The Book of Negroes, that is, its Dutch translation, by an activist named Roy Groenberg, leader of a group known as the Foundation Honor and Restore Victims of Slavery in Suriname. The burning did not take place, although Groenberg publicly burned a photocopy of the book’s cover. Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: An Anatomy of A Book Burning is Lawrence Hill’s response to the provocation from Groenberg, received by email, from which he takes the title of this long essay. It is Hill’s coming to terms with the intention to burn his book and his working out of his relationship to such acts of censorship. Indeed, Hill seeks to do more in the essay than cast the event as merely one of censorship and instead seeks to make some kind of...