Discussion on question by anseltan014: Quoting a book whose title contains a racial slur

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15:52

Q: Quoting a book whose title contains a racial slur

I'm writing a paper on the Front de Liberation du Quebec; a homegrown Quebec terrorist organisation in the 1960s. As research, I've extensively studied a book by one of the intellectual leaders of the organisation Pierre Vallières called 'White (n-word)s of America'. Given the rather alarming tit...

Azor Ahai -him-

Is the title in English or French?

justauser

Some answers to a similar question on ResearchGate suggest that you provide a code word for the slur and explain its meaning in the Glossary: researchgate.net/post/…

Noah Snyder

This is one of the questions where the overwhelming slant towards science on this website means you’re unlikely to get good advice, you need to talk to humanists. This is not an issue one needs to navigate in a math paper.

Cameron Williams

See if you can find other references to this book and see what they have done with the title, especially recent references.

Ben Bolker

Not an answer, but a reference to some controversy to the use of the (unredacted) title in a high school history textbook ... thecanadafiles.com/articles/sadwa , cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/…

I wonder if there's any useful material to be found by looking at references to Joseph Conrad's "N***** of the Narcissus"? (It has a Wikipedia page ..)

einpoklum

15:52

@AzorAhai-him-: Both. Originally, the book was in French; OP lists the translated title.

@NoahSnyder: I take offense with your claim that scientists would not give good advice on this matter.

Noah Snyder

Offense? Really? Why would you possibly take offense that most scientists don’t know about publishing conventions for humanities papers? I wouldn’t expect a historian to know that math is written in 1st person plural.

WernerCD

This site is about academia... why wouldn't it include humanities and human interaction?

Federico Poloni

@NoahSnyder True. On the other hand it is a good thing to see here more questions about humanities, so that we can hope to reduce the slant.

Džuris

@NoahSnyder simliar issues come up in math, I've come across one when I had to cite an article from Annals of Eugenics. I guess statisticians come across these a lot more as Galton, Pearson and Fisher developed much of their statistical methods as tools for racism and eugenics.

cbeleites unhappy with SX

Are you asking about the citation in the reference list or about quoting parts of the text?

Tom

15:52

If this helps, last time I read a book of Conrad where the book people mention was referenced in the Introduction, the title of the book was not censored. This was a while ago, so I'm not sure if the Zeitgeist in the humanities has changed since then, that could be possible.

Kaz

How about "White TmlnZ2Vycw==¹ of America"? The ¹ footnote gives brief instructions that these characters are in a computer code called Base64, and can be decoded by numerous software, including on the web. ... And to think someone said STEM people can't deal with issues in humanities, bah!