Unsettled Voices Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era

From resurgent racisms to longstanding Islamophobia, from settler colonial refusals of First Nations voices to border politics and migration debates, ‘free speech’ has been weaponised to target racialized communities and bolster authoritarian rule. Unsettled Voices identifies the severe limitations and the violent consequences of ‘free speech debates’ typical of contemporary cultural politics, and explores the possibilities to combat racism when liberal values underpin emboldened white supremacy. What kind of everyday racially motivated speech is protected by such an interpretation of liberal ideology? How do everyday forms of social expression that vilify and intimidate find shelter through an inflation of the notion of freedom of speech? Furthermore, how do such forms refuse the idea that language can be a performative act from which harm can be derived?Racialized speech has conjured and shaped the subjectivities of multiple intersecting participants, reproducing new and problematic forms of precarity.These vulnerabilities have been experienced from the sound of rubber bullets in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to UK hate speech legislation, to the spontaneous performace of a First Nations war dance on the Australian Rules football pitch. This book identifies the deep limitations and the violent consequences of the longstanding and constantly developing ‘free speech debates’ typical of so many contexts in the West, and explores the possibilities to combat racism when liberal values are ‘weaponized’ to target racialized communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Introduction: Unsettled Voices: Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era Tanja Dreher, Michael Griffiths and Timothy Laurie 1. Beyond denial: ‘not racism’ as racist violence Alana Lentin 2. 'You cunts can do as you like': the obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas Chelsea Bond, Bryan Mukandi and Shane Coghill 3. Off script and indefensible: the failure of the 'moderate Muslim' Randa Abdel-Fattah and Mehal Krayem 4. Inquiry mentality and occasional mourning in the settler colonial carceral Micaela Sahhar and Michael R. Griffiths 5. What does racial (in)justice sound like? On listening, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes Poppy de Souza 6. The ‘free speech’ of the (un)free Yassir Morsi 7. Silence and resistance: Aboriginal women working within and against the archive Evelyn Araluen Corr 8. The shape of free speech: rethinking liberal free speech theory Anshuman A. Mondal 9. In a different voice: 'a letter from Manus Island' as poetic manifesto Anne Surma 10. Manus prison poetics/our voice: revisiting 'A Letter From Manus Island', a reply to Anne Surma Behrouz Boochani 11. Behrouz Boochani and the Manus Prison narratives: merging translation with philosophical reading Omid Tofighian Afterword: Reconstructing voices and situated listening Timothy Laurie, Tanja Dreher, Michael Griffiths and Omid Tofighian

Tanja Dreher is Scientia Associate Professor in Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Tanja’s research focuses on the politics of listening in the context of media and resurgent racisms, Indigenous sovereignties and intersectional feminism. Michael R. Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (2018). His essays have appeared in Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Humanities Review, and many other venues. He is an active participant in the Jindaola Project—an initiative on decolonizing curriculum within the University of Wollongong. Timothy Laurie is Lecturer at the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His core research interests include cultural theory, gender and sexuality studies, and philosophy, and he is the Managing Editor of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. Currently, Timothy is a co-authoring a book with Dr Hannah Stark on love and politics.