To Read or Not to Read: Critical Literacy and Book Ban in Indonesia

ABSTRACT This study explores critical literacy practice as a response to book ban in Indonesia, a nation shaped by colonial and authoritarian legacies of censorship. Through qualitative Classroom Action Research within a university‐level Critical Reading course, it examines how students engage with historically contested novels, namely Bumi Manusia and Laut Bercerita , to confront state‐controlled narratives. The findings reveal that critical literacy, when grounded in local histories of censorship, enables students to move from passive acceptance to active interrogation of state power. Through engagement with banned novels, students developed three interconnected capacities: recognizing censorship as a spectrum of political control rather than neutral administration; identifying dominant and alternative ideologies; and reclaiming interpretive agency by connecting silenced histories to contemporary politics. This development did not happen automatically; rather, it emerged through classroom discussion and guided research that pushed students to ask questions regarding book banning. The study highlights that critical literacy is not a universal toolkit but a situated praxis that, when calibrated to specific contexts of suppression, equips learners to decode state narratives, interrogate textual control, and confront repression over the narrative of what to read and not to read.