Words that challenge

Publishing veteran John Oakes has transformed the publishing business by co-founding OR Books in the US, which has been bringing out some of the unheard voices from across the world, and has been putting a reader directly in touch with the publisher. Having published hundreds of books by the likes of Julian Assange, Abbie Hoffman, Andrea Dworkin, Ross King, and John Waters, Oakes isn’t a stranger to fighting censorships and standing by the words.

A book of Julian Assange’s from OR Books.

During his recent visit to Chennai, where he delivered a talk on the evolving publishing scene in the US, at Tara Books, Oakes spoke to DC about government censorships across the world and on being critical during US President Donald Trump’s regime, whose political stances have been raising alarms globally. With a rising extent of censorship by governments in a lot of countries, including India, Oakes believes that it is counterproductive to censor any voice.

“If a government has to censor someone’s writings, it shows that it has something to fear about. We can’t and shouldn’t have only one kind of discourse. It’s important that we talk about censorship. I publish several books that are critical of Trump, and I intend to continue doing that. But I would say there are many forms of censorship in the US, and one such is that where the Republicans are keen to cut the National Endowment for the Arts that supports a lot of literary publishers. Under Trump, there’s an attack on the arts,” the publisher of the recently-revived Evergreen Review, says.

For publishing books like Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Freedom of the Internet by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Oakes suspects ‘strongly’ that he could find out in a decade or so that he has been under government surveillance.

“I have the feeling that I’m being watched, although I haven’t had any indication. But, I will be astounded if I weren’t being tracked,” he states firmly. Arts tend to challenge regimes with fixed ideologies, he adds.

Oakes also predicts that traditional publishing is soon going to see a transformation with self publishing on the rise — “Self publishing has achieved a level of legitimacy that it didn’t have a decade ago. I don’t think traditional publishing would go away, but I do think it’s going to transform.”  

Oakes will soon be publishing an anthology of Tibetan short stories, one of the first western publishers to take up a project like this, which Navayana will be bringing out in India.