Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"By drawing forensic attention to the structural conditions under which ‘free speech’ debates appear as debates, both the impossibility and necessity for speaking, writing, and being heard in colonial Australia becomes visible. This is a rich collection of voices, united in their ability to carve out ways forward from this impasse by offering critique and decolonial vision in equal measure. The collection powerfully demonstrates the role of anti-colonial critique in forging new paths beyond the persisting lie of terra nullius." Maria Giannacopoulos, University of South Australia "Free speech conflicts are a recurring feature of highly mediatised and irreducibly multicultural publics. This exceptional collection of essays transcends the comforting circularity of normative debates about the limits of speech to examine how and why freedom of speech has come to act as such a productive site of antagonism. Ranging across writing styles and critical approaches, every single essay is perceptive. Taken together, they provide us with a cumulative project of significant theoretical innovation, and keen contemporary insight." Gavan Titley, Maynooth University "The beautiful concepts valorised in the western world, like tolerance, democracy and free speech, are like the valorised beautiful lifestyles and privileges that come with them, enmeshed in the ongoing colonial, practical and symbolic violence that is their condition of production. The authors of this book, collectively and individually, take the concept of ‘free speech’, shatter the vitrine of sublime concepts where it is positioned, and lay bare its aggressive colonial kernel. This makes for essential reading." Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne

By drawing forensic attention to the structural conditions under which ‘free speech’ debates appear as debates, both the impossibility and necessity for speaking, writing, and being heard in colonial Australia becomes visible. This is a rich collection of voices, united in their ability to carve out ways forward from this impasse by offering critique and decolonial vision in equal measure. The collection powerfully demonstrates the role of anti-colonial critique in forging new paths beyond the persisting lie of terra nullius.Maria Giannacopoulos, University of South AustraliaFree speech conflicts are a recurring feature of highly mediatised and irreducibly multicultural publics. This exceptional collection of essays transcends the comforting circularity of normative debates about the limits of speech to examine how and why freedom of speech has come to act as such a productive site of antagonism. Ranging across writing styles and critical approaches, every single essay is perceptive. Taken together, they provide us with a cumulative project of significant theoretical innovation, and keen contemporary insight.Gavan Titley, Maynooth UniversityThe beautiful concepts valorised in the western world, like tolerance, democracy and free speech, are like the valorised beautiful lifestyles and privileges that come with them, enmeshed in the ongoing colonial, practical and symbolic violence that is their condition of production. The authors of this book, collectively and individually, take the concept of ‘free speech’, shatter the vitrine of sublime concepts where it is positioned, and lay bare its aggressive colonial kernel. This makes for essential reading.Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne