‘Silent Voices/Forbidden Lives: Censorship and Performance’ was the topic of IFTR's annual conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2009. Introducing the theme of the conference, the organizers signalled the importance of censorship for Portugal and other countries with histories of governmental dictatorship, given the ways in which this has made an impact or left its mark on the cultural, social and political fabric of the nation. The first two articles in this issue, by Jean Graham-Jones and Paul Rae, arose out of papers presented at the Lisbon conference. Both authors open up the censorship debate to argue for more subtle accounts of how the term is conceptualized. In brief, both are mindful of the cautionary note sounded in an earlier TRI article on ‘the limits of censorship’ by Janelle Reinelt where she writes, ‘“Censorship” has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it.’