The Settler Coloniality of Free Speech

Public and scholarly debates surrounding free speech often assume free speech is a public good and/or should be approached as a problem of “drawing the line” between free and regulated or benign and harmful speech. In contrast, Dr. Leigh provides a genealogy of free speech in which liberal freedom of expression has, since its inception, been integral to white supremacist settler colonialism in the United Kingdom and its former settler colonies, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Leigh’s work argues that, far from a noble struggle against regulation, liberal politics around free speech establish oppositions between white “civilized” speech and its Indigenized racially darkened “others” as well as controlling or silencing Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech across the Anglosphere.

Darcy is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex, working at the intersection of Law and International Relations. Their research explores the legacies of European colonialisms for the international politics of race, gender and sexuality, often in the context of human rights or social movements, and always from trans, queer, decolonial and/or diasporist Jewish perspectives. For the past ten years, they have focussed on the colonial dimensions of resurgent Anglo-European ethnonationalism, especially in the contexts of free speech movements, opposition to trans rights, and antisemitism. They are currently writing a monograph from this project, provisionally titled Uncivil: Struggles for Expression in the Wake of Empire.