Agatha Christie’s books reprinted to eliminate racist content

The books by Agatha Christie, author of classics such as “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile”, will be re-edited to remove the racist content contained in the original works. According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, publisher HarperCollins hired “sensitive readers” to review the materials and propose changes.

The newspaper points out that some passages of novels featuring the characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple have been “reworked or removed” with the aim of eliminating references to the ethnicity of some characters or omitting their physical descriptions altogether.

Christie’s was known for stereotypical depictions of Asian people and the term “Oriental” was dropped from new editions. Additionally, character descriptions such as “Nubians”, “Gypsies” and “a Jew” were also removed from several novels.

In other cases, the content has been changed, replacing offensive words with more acceptable ones. For example, in one book, Christie describes “a black servant,” stating that he “smiled when he saw the need to keep quiet about an incident.” In the new version, the character is neither black nor smiling. Rather, he’s just “nodding his head.”

This kind of practice of re-editing offensive content from classic books has become increasingly common. In addition to Agatha Christie, books by Roald Dahl (author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) and Ian Fleming (“007”) have undergone a similar process. However, this has generated a lot of criticism from readers, who complain that publishers are destroying historical documents.

Disney, for example, has included warnings at the beginning of some of its animations available on the Disney+ streaming platform, stating that they contain racist and/or offensive cartoons. However, the studio has not touched the source material.

In the case of Agatha Christie, some of her books have already gone through this type of edition. One of her books was called “Ten Little Indians” (Ten Little Indians, in literal translation). And if the name wasn’t bad enough, it has earned the title of “O Caso dos Dez Negrinhos” in Brazil. Over time, the book was renamed “And Then There Were None”.

Source: Terra

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