Special
Section of First Amendment Studies
Race,
coloniality & free speech
Guest
Editors: Anjali Vats and Mohan Dutta
Full
manuscripts Due: January 20, 2020
In
this special focus on “Race, Coloniality, and Free Speech” in First
Amendment Studies we seek 2,500-3,000 word manuscripts that interrogate the
racial and colonial structures that animate free speech, including connections
between free speech and Whiteness and the ways in which these connections are
deployed in academia to protect and perpetuate racist hate. We also invite
submissions that theorize frameworks for resisting the Whiteness of free
speech. We are particularly interested in
essays that push us to think about the intersections between race, coloniality,
and free speech differently, using new and evolving theories drawn from
critical race studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, decolonial theory, and
so on, at a national and/or international level. While we welcome critical
legal perspectives on race, coloniality, and free speech, legal analysis is not
required.
In
the United States recently, with the rise of President Donald Trump’s violent
and virulent rhetorics, conflicts over the protections offered by the First
Amendment, particularly free speech, have been front and center in
conversations. In one example of this political disagreement, protesters at the
University of California, Berkeley effectively thwarted an appearance by
conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos during Free Speech Week. Over the
decades, critical race scholars have pushed back against the notion of free
speech in various ways. Mari Matsuda’s now canonical book, Words that Wound:
Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment, laid
out arguments for punishing hate speech. Yet the Supreme Court has repeatedly
refused to do so, as demonstrated by cases including National Socialist
Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977) and RAV v. City of Saint
Paul (1992).
While
the First Amendment is a particularly American creation, debates over free
speech are a global phenomenon. In Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa,
Neoliberal Singapore, Communist China, and Hindutva India, constraints on free
speech have been used to construct and enforce racial, ethnic, religious, caste
and class hierarchies. In Europe, particularly given histories of Nazi
violence, free speech has come to be treated with suspicion, as a way of
encouraging division, war, and genocide. In Singapore, calls for religious
harmony and social cohesion were used to censor digital expressions, as through
the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), passed in
2019. In settler colonial Aotearoa, New Zealand, the freedom of speech of
racist colonial articulations is situated amidst the ongoing struggles for
Maori rights protected under the Treaty of Waitangi. The international examples
demonstrate the complexity and nuance of free speech conversations.
These contemplations leave us with a set of questions,
including: Where can critical race studies go from the insights of the 1980s
onward on questions of free speech, race, and coloniality? What other
contemporary theories -- e.g. affect, intimacy, postrace, racial capitalism,
and so on -- can be brought to bear on free speech studies? How do recent
political turns in the US and globally shape the way that free speech is
deployed in the service of whiteness? How does free speech operate as a
colonial practice, underwritten by a philosophy of whiteness as property? In
what ways is free speech embedded in systems of racial capitalism, which
continue to evolve through practices of Empire, policing, and other forms of
disciplinary power? What are openings exist for incorporating free speech in
anti-racist activism?
We
invite 2,500 - 3000 word manuscripts that address these and/or other questions
at the intersections of race, coloniality, and free speech. Authors may wish to
consider:
•
How
critical race studies can evolve with respect to its engagements with race,
coloniality, and free speech in light of new theoretical turns;
•
How
race and free speech interface with labor and labor disputes (e.g. in the
context of LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick in the U.S.);
•
How
race and coloniality interface with branding (e.g. as in cases such as Blackhorse
v. Pro Football Inc. and Matal v. Tam);
•
How
social media changes the landscapes on which race, coloniality, and free speech
interface and how we might respond to those changes (e.g. the protection of
online falsehoods and manipulation act in Singapore; the doxxing case of Suey
Park, creator of #NotYourAsianSidekick, in the U.S.);
•
How
whiteness philosophically and discursively shapes terrains of free speech,
particularly in settler colonial spaces;
•
How
race and free speech interface with questions of coloniality/modernity as
decolonial thinkers theorize those categories;
•
How
free speech operates as a tool of reconciliation in societies that have faced
racial and ethnic conflict;
•
How
free speech has historically and contemporarily been deployed as a disciplinary
tool to keep racial and colonial power intact;
•
How
free speech implicates communicative ethics around race and coloniality,
particularly with respect to marginalized populations;
•
How
free speech is deployed as a mechanism for policing civility in ways that
discipline people of color and silence those who resist that discipline (e.g.
the ongoing attacks on Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement);
•
How
the embodied performance of free speech is defined racially and colonially, by
virtue of which bodies are acting and speaking;
•
How
free speech serves as alibi for racism (e.g. the speech of Hobson’s pledge in
Aotearoa, New Zealand, that disseminates anti-Maori ideology);
•
How
free speech implicates racial and colonial practices within academic
disciplines (e.g. with respect to the Medhurst Letter); and
•
How
free speech practices around race and coloniality could stand to change in
academia, with respect to precarious faculty members, graduate labor, campus
demonstrations, patronage (e.g. repression on Indian university campuses);
•
How
free speech is incorporated as an anti-racist tool; and
•
Other
topics that fit within the call as described.
Please submit your paper at: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfsy20. There,
you can find author instructions for uploading your submission.
The guest editors, in consultation with the First Amendment
Studies editorial staff and peer reviewers, will make decisions on the
final essays. The process for publishing the essays will include the
following:
·
Initial review of submitted papers by guest editors;
·
Anonymous peer review of papers approved by the guest editors;
and
Revision and final submission of accepted peer-reviewed papers.
Please contact Anjali Vats (anjali.s.vats@gmail.com) and Mohan
J. Dutta (M.J.Dutta@massey.ac.nz) with any questions you may have about the
special section or pitches for articles to be submitted. All submissions should
be addressed to Kevin Johnson (Kevin.Johnson@csulb.edu), Editor of First
Amendment Studies, and the guest editors.