Shifting the terms of debate: speaking, writing and listening beyond free speech debates

When the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopolous toured Australia in late 2017, he attacked familiar targets – Muslims, feminists and much of the mainstream media – as well as ridiculing Aboriginal art as ‘crap’ and ‘really shit’. Demonstrating the transnational scope and ubiquity of contemporary racisms, the UK-born, US-based and internationally-known ‘free speech’ advocate had little difficulty in identifying the key targets of vilification in Australia. This theme issue 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.

The collection thus examines the globally mediated politics of ‘free speech’ that has circulated since at least the debates on the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Danish cartoons controversy of 2005 and more recently, the murders at Charlie Hebdo in Paris. What kind of everyday racially motivated speech is protected by narrow interpretations 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 and a refusal of the idea that language can be a performative act from which harm can be derived? These questions are explored in transnational contexts with a particular focus on settler colonial Australia.

The paradoxes of free speech debates in Australia

From racist cartoons to booing at football matches, contemporary multicultures and settler colonies are characterized by recurring debates about the meaning of free speech and its limits. These mediated debates on freedom of expression are a flashpoint for wider processes of racialization, nationalism and border policing. Here we sketch just a few of the high profile ‘controversies’ that have characterized the long-running free speech ‘debates’ in Australia, all of which are analysed in detail in the articles that follow.

Indigeneity and Islam have been at the centre of heated public debates about free speech in Australia, with conservative politicians and commentators asserting the absolute nature of freedom of speech over and against the everyday suffering it can cause. The 2016 federal election saw re-elected members of government call immediately for the repeal of legislation that regulates hate speech, Section18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. This marked a renewal of the long-running ‘18C debate’ triggered in 2011 by one of the rare rulings under this legislation, in which the conservative journalist Andrew Bolt was found in breach of anti-vilification provisions as two columns focused on a number of Indigenous Australians were, according to the court, not written in good faith and contained factual errors. The debate gained further momentum when the Human Rights Commission began an investigation of a cartoon by Bill Leak, a regular contributor to the national broadsheet The Australian, in which Leak depicted an Aboriginal father with a beer can in his hand and unable to recall his son’s name. The cartoon appeared not long after the TV broadcast of footage of Dylan Voller, a First Nations teenager, shackled and in a spit hood in a juvenile detention centre. Described as ‘Australia’s Abu Ghraib’, this footage also prompted claims that poor parenting was to blame for the massive over-incarceration of Indigenous children in Australia – an attitude that was inflated by Leak’s cartoon.

As elsewhere, recent years have seen a resurgence of far right political parties and movements in Australia. The return of One Nation’s Pauline Hanson to the federal parliament prompted defence of a celebrity talk show host who advocated banning Muslim immigration. During 2015, star Australian Football League (AFL) player and former Australian of the Year, Adnyamathanha man Adam Goodes was subjected to a sustained campaign of booing by AFL crowds. Much of the public debate centred on the claim that this booing was ‘not racist’, but rather a benign sporting tradition. During the 18C controversy the federal Attorney-General defended what he called ‘the right to be a bigot’.

While debate on the freedom to vilify is high on the media and public agenda, the policing of racialized voices raises far less concern. First Nations leaders routinely call on governments to listen to Indigenous voices and expertise, to little avail. Most recently, the Uluru Statement from the Heart proposed an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, only to be rejected out of hand by the Turnbull federal government. In 2016, Warlpiri woman and Minister for Local Government Bess Nungarrayi Price was warned over disorderly conduct and told by the Speaker ‘the language of the assembly is English’ after she interjected in Warlpiri in a Northern Territory parliamentary debate. Kaurna elder Katrina Ngaityalya Power was criticized as ‘insulting’ and ‘disrespectful’ for a 2017 ANZAC Day speech which referenced invasion and slavery.

A Facebook post by former ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied on the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) Day 2017, the national public holiday commemorating ANZAC and Australian military forces generally, was also the catalyst for a vitriolic public debate. Like Goodes, Abdel-Magied was a former Young Queenslander of the Year and sat on numerous boards. After she posted ‘Lest We Forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine …)’, the public broadcaster acquiesced to calls to end her contract and Abdel-Magied eventually left Australia. Later in 2017, a submission by the Islamic Council of Victoria that federal funding was urgently needed to create safe space for Muslim youth to meet and talk about a range of issues ‘which in a public space would sound inflammatory’ was dismissed as advocating for ‘hate space’ by the Victorian Premier.

This edition of Continuum examines how these free speech controversies serve to silence the voices of those marked as other globally today, and foreground possibilities to work beyond this paradox. Within liberal political culture, the terms of debate by which difference is processed have risked subordinating considerations of equality to increasingly dominant and inflated conceptions of freedom. In the post 9/11 world globally, Muslim subjects are called upon to perform an ideal of the moderate, good, liberal subject that is nonetheless vulnerable to the label of ‘radicalism’. First Nations in settler colonies are often called upon to perform such liberal subjectivity and silenced if they refuse political norms. For instance, Indigenous people calling to change or abolish ‘Australia Day’, a national public holiday celebrated on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788 are labelled as divisive, uncivil or dangerous.

While the debates on Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act and racist cartoons have continued to make headlines for years, a range of laws that increasingly restrict free speech in broad ways are overlooked (Gelber 2017). For example, in 2015 a law was introduced prohibiting ‘entrusted persons’ employed in asylum seeker detention centres from disclosing protected information. State governments have passed laws that increase police powers and curtail the right to peacefully protest. Recent laws also threaten the ability of journalists to expose government activities that are corrupt or illegal (Gelber 2017). A proposed Bill preventing the acceptance of international donations if the money goes towards advocacy has the potential to silence the vital advocacy role of charities and NGOs (Price 2017).

These restrictions on freedom of speech will be familiar in many contexts, including the USA where the Trump administration has extended anti-protest laws and issued the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention a list of ‘forbidden words’, or France which has seen ‘a steady creep towards ever more repressive state surveillance’ since the Charlie Hebdo attacks (Titley et al. 2017). In these contexts as in Australia, public criticism of these restrictions is muted, while the ‘free speech debates’ centred on the right to vilify racialized communities rage on. Here we see the hypocrisy and the conservative agenda of so much high profile and highly charged public ‘debate’ on the vital and very complex questions of speech, consequences and regulation. ‘Free speech’ has become a key battleground in long-running culture wars, played out in specific national and local contexts and deeply inflected by transnational mediation. Indeed, we see that liberal values such as ‘free speech’ have been ‘weaponized’ (Fekete in Titley et al. 2017), inextricably connected to the increased surveillance and over-policing of racialized communities in Europe, North America, Australia and beyond.

Shifting the terms of debate

This special issue is an opportunity to reframe the debate on speech and difference from outside liberal frameworks. It attempts to open up new ways to defend cultural difference and to do anti-racism work, while imagining new pathways to freedom and equality. The articles in this theme issue not only critique, but also move beyond the racist and conservative agenda of free speech debates, suggesting possibilities to think beyond the limitations of the liberal free speech paradigm.

The theme issue begins with a contribution by Alana Lentin, ‘Beyond denial: “Not Racism” as racist violence’ which shows that the excusing of racism is itself a reification and amplification of it – ‘doubling down’ on ‘discursive violence’ as she puts it. Building on an exhaustive survey of recent studies in critical consideration of racism, Lentin reminds us that racism is not an attitude but an action. What Lentin calls ‘not racism’, describes this ‘denial and redefinition of racism’. The article draws out multiple forms of minimizing racism, for instance, the claim that calling attention to racism is ‘unhelpful’. The article usefully frames several key concerns that run through all the articles in this issue. Most crucially, like a number of our contributors, Lentin implicitly shows that while unconstrained free speech advocates accuse us anti-racist killjoys – we who point out the structural violence of the speech they would defend – of restricting free speech, the restriction and diminution of the value of speech is often covertly undertaken by these ‘not racist’ free speech advocates themselves. By delegitimising speech that takes umbrage with structural racism a whole range of perspectives are refused a voice and platform for enunciation. ‘Not racism,’ as Lentin names it, amplifies white fear of being labelled racist even as it diminishes the space within which people of colour and anti-racists might use speech to call attention to instances of their marginalization and silencing.

The diminution of freedom (of speech and otherwise) from the experience of people of colour in the context of white supremacist societies is markedly drawn out in ‘“You cunts can do as you like”: The obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas’ by Chelsea Bond, Bryan Mukandi and Shane Coghill. Bond, Mukandi and Coghill work from the example of Aboriginal song woman Deborah Cheetham’s refusal to sing the words ‘we are young and free’, on an invitation to publically perform the Australian national anthem. Youth and freedom, here, signify values of Australia’s settler population – the idea of Australia as a ‘young’ country founded on 200 years of settlement and not 40,000 years of Indigenous habitation as well as that of the freedom of the settler population, which First Nations experience to a highly diminished degree. Cheetham proposed, instead, the words ‘in peace and harmony’, as alternative lyrics for the anthem for her performance (and was refused).

That Cheetham would prefer to foreground the aspiration of her people to ‘peace and harmony’ over the fiction of Australia’s ‘youth and freedom’ reveals the degree to which certain liberal values have come to privilege whiteness while others might contribute to conviviality (Gilroy 2004). Where liberty, equality and fraternity perhaps marked the founding values of modern liberalism, in many of the contributions in this issue we see that freedom is a value that can both emancipate and privilege. Equality – or ‘peace and harmony’ to use Cheetham’s formulation of it – might be seen as an equally important value that could restore some balance to the distribution of freedom and agency in societies where freedom of speech is often disproportionately allowed. As Bond, Mukandi and Coghill suggest, freedom in the phrase ‘we are young and free’ is not neutral but is predicated on the elimination or assimilation of ‘Blackfullas’. This difference in application of standards for speech is drawn out further since, as Bond, Mukandi and Coghill survey, a disproportionate number of Aboriginal prisoners are incarcerated for charges linked to ‘offensive language’. As they point out, there is a deep asymmetry between the Australian ‘Attorney General’s claim that Australians have the “right to be bigots” and say things that may cause offense, and the systematic over-surveillance and incarceration of Blackfullas on offensive language charges’. The ostensibly neutral right to speech is not equally distributed.

There is a similarly bitter irony in the way Australian broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied was widely censured in media circles for what was seen as offensive speech by the very conservatives who claimed that free speech should remain unconstrained. What is revealed in this exchange is that free speech can be constrained but tends to be more so when it offends hegemonic values over and against when it is challenged in instances of harm to racialized minorities. That challenges to free speech from people of colour and their allies are seen as political incorrectness is then, often, counteracted by the hegemony of what some have called ‘patriotic correctness’. Randa Abdel-Fattah and Mehal Krayem call attention to just this double bind in their article, which takes the case of Abdel Maggied as a starting point. They argue that the speech of the ideal ‘moderate Muslim’ is not a form of enunciation that can readily dissent from mainstream liberal views without facing the charge of radicalism. Thus, for Abdel-Fattah and Krayem, ‘[t]he ideal moderate’ is ‘simply a cosmetic addition to the multicultural display with no overt political inclinations and certainly no agenda to unsettle and destabilize the centrality of Whiteness’.

While Abdel-Fattah and Krayem focus on the discourse of the ‘moderate Muslim’ that is coaxed and rewarded in the public sphere, Micaela Sahhar and Michael R Griffiths analyse how modes and manifestations of speech are managed and, at times, circumscribed, within the operations of settler colonial liberalism. These authors focus on forms of speech such as protest and government inquiries to unravel how forms of speech that critique or challenge settler colonial sovereignty are often restrained. The article ‘Inquiry Mentality and Occasional Mourning in the Settler Colonial Carceral’ focuses on the management of difference both internally in relation to First Nations bodies and externally in relation to refugees and asylum seekers by appropriating a late liberal language of ‘protection’. The ‘inquiry mentality’ ‘produces a din of discourse about the “tragic” violence to which First Nations subjects are subordinated without implementing the measures which might not only ameliorate such conditions but dismantle the settler colonial carceral as such’. Protests, vigils and public dissent in support of incarcerated refugees and asylum seekers are seen to be individualized and personalized – for example, the slogan ‘not in my name’ – and thus incapable of harnessing a collective force or the transformative impact required for the structural re-framing of discourse.

Poppy de Souza’s contribution, ‘What does racial (in)justice sound like?’ centres on the booing of Adnyamathanha man Adam Goodes during the 2015 AFL season. Goodes drew sustained booing for weeks after performing a celebratory Indigenous dance on scoring a goal. De Souza suggests ‘[i]n the popular imagination at least, the roar of the crowd is the sonic barometer that measures who is accepted and who is rejected’. The essay is an attempt to make sense of the popular refusal to accept that it was racism that led to the booing of Goodes. What, de Souza asks, prevents some from ‘hearing racism in the crowd’s booing?’. De Souza parses what she calls the ‘acoustic violence’ arising when ‘those who are the targets of racialized violence become attuned to sonic qualities that are indistinct to untrained ears’. She identifies this acoustic violence by traversing multiple examples, from the U. S. South under Jim Crow to the Occupied West Bank and back to the football stadiums of 2015 Australia in order to show how often ‘the white ear marks out the sonic boundary between belonging and non-belonging (or un-belonging), inclusion and exclusion; where words and sounds perform another kind of dispossession and displacement’.

Yassir Morsi’s contribution to this theme issue further develops the analysis developed by Krayem and Abdel-Fattah, calling attention to the inability for a Muslim to speak freely vested precisely in the context of contemporary liberal free speech debates. Morsi’s essay, ‘The “Free Speech” of the (un)Free’, foregrounds his own position through an autoethnographic technique of writing; as he puts it, ‘this research paper’s nonlinear logic and its absence of sequence is my argument. I want in my discussion on free speech to embody my struggles as an “Islamist” to freely speak’. Through storytelling and confession, Morsi’s essay subtly articulates the degree to which a Muslim voice that wishes to depart from (and, indeed, challenge) the commonplace articulations of the apologist for Islam (the moderate) is always stifled and, indeed, stuttering. The essay centres on an account of a television appearance during which Morsi struggled to find a way to critique Western colonialism without playing the role of the ‘good Muslim’ who must first denounce terrorist acts and movements of which he is not a part. The strength of Morsi’s contribution comes above all in its method – revealing in a performative mode the degree to which challenges to the logic of liberalism will always, themselves, lack the cogency generated by liberalism’s own self-generating logic. Morsi shows how, at least within liberal forms, the Muslim cannot speak. In speaking about this withholding of speech, Morsi’s essay speaks volumes.

Evelyn Araluen Corr’s article, ‘Silence and resistance: Aboriginal women working within and against the archive’ acts to restore and record the history of Aboriginal women’s self-representation as an explicit response to the silencing, specifically, of Aboriginal women’s voices. Araluen Corr draws out the ambivalence of the colonial archive as simultaneously a site of the subordination of Aboriginal people to power (both material and symbolic) and also a space of reclamation – ‘a repository of family history and thus also a site of recovery’. The essay usefully surveys the work of multiple contributors to this critique of archive fever, from Larissa Behrendt to Natalie Harkin. The heart of her contribution comes in a sustained account of Maria Lock – a Dharug woman who, in the 1830s, was the first recorded writer to identify as Aboriginal. As Araluen Corr suggests,

Engaging directly with Aboriginal expression in this period does not reveal a reconciled endorsement of Aboriginality as a relational primitivism of colonial authority, but rather a pluralism of the modes in which Aboriginal people resisted the material implications of their racial status.

Araluen Corr’s essay thus draws out the way Aboriginal women have, since contact, been articulating resistance in modes that are often in contention with stereotypical and reductive traces dominating the archive.

The theme issue is rounded off with an exploration by Anshuman A. Mondal of the spatial metaphorics on which liberal ideas of freedom of expression are grounded (and how they might otherwise be). In ‘The shape of free speech: Re-thinking liberal free speech theory’, Mondal anchors his discussion in a timely revisiting of one of the classic documents of liberalism, John Stuart Mill’s 1859 On Liberty. In doing so, Mondal suggests two spatial metaphors: one that describes how Mill sees liberty functioning and one that describes how liberty might actually and more usefully be understood to function. The first is that of ‘a single plane: smooth, continuous, homogeneous, indivisible and extendable without interruption until it reaches the outer limits,’. This conception of liberty sees it as ‘unidimensional’, not possessing positive freedom but always being defined by an uninterrupted and uninterruptable negative freedom (‘freedom from’) that is never to be interrupted. For Mondal, Mill commits an error in suggesting that individual freedom of opinion is absolute and, in particular, in extending that absolutism to the external plane of social relations. These subtle deconstructions of the limits of Mill’s classical assertions on liberty are accompanied by a constructive suggestion for possible future ways to construe freedom. Mondal suggests, following Talal Asad, that freedom, far from being a kind of homogeneous planar force, is a set of ‘liquid’ flows that are shaped by external social forces. Freedom is not an absolute irreducible value, then, but rather one which can be shaped to positive and negative ends; if freedom can be curtailed, then we can also debate the circumstances when it might (or might not) be appropriate for it to be curtailed.

Read together, the articles in this theme issue mark out the limitations of so many contemporary ‘free speech debates’, highlight the violent consequences for racialized peoples, and suggest vital alternatives. We see here an important focus on the politics of voice and listening, and the necessity to shift hierarchies of attention and value. There is an urgent need to privilege the voices and stories which are routinely marginalized or silenced in public discourse – to amplify First Nations sovereign voices, dissenting voices, Muslim voices other than the ‘moderate Muslim’, asylum seeker voices and more. The argument here is not ‘anti-free speech’, but rather works from a reckoning of the deep, racialized inequalities of speech that characterize contemporary liberalism, arguing instead for the amplification of disenfranchised voices. We also argue for a nuanced understanding of ‘freedom’ that is tempered with the values of solidarity and equality. These new understandings might include new modes by which speech is ‘shaped’ – the way context and ideology play a role in the way speech is constructed as protected (or, indeed, harmful) in contemporary liberalism. We need to call upon ourselves and others to remake a public culture that insists that the freedom of speech outstrips all other liberties.