Unsettled Voices

Beyond Free Speech in the Late Liberal Era

Tanja Dreher, Michael R. Griffiths, Timothy Laurie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000372083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Unsettled voices: beyond free speech in the late liberal era
•  1 Beyond denial: ‘not racism’ as racist violence
•  2 ‘You cunts can do as you like’: the obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas
•  3 Off script and indefensible: the failure of the ‘moderate Muslim’
•  4 Inquiry mentality and occasional mourning in the settler colonial carceral
•  5 What does racial (in)justice sound like? On listening, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes
•  6 The ‘free speech’ of the (un)free
•  7 Silence and resistance: Aboriginal women working within and against the archive
•  8 The shape of free speech: rethinking liberal free speech theory
•  9 In a different voice: ‘a letter from Manus Island’ as poetic manifesto
• 10 Manus prison poetics/our voice: revisiting ‘A Letter From Manus Island’, a reply to Anne Surma
• 11 Behrouz Boochani and the Manus Prison narratives: merging translation with philosophical reading
• Afterword: reconstructing voices and situated listening
• Index