Pronouncing (Un)Freedom

  • Shama Rangwala

Freedom as rooted in liberal individualism is materially supported and proliferated by the structural violence of colonialism and racial capitalism. Freedom has been invoked ardently by those who tyrannize others, such as the American Founding Father and enslaver Thomas Jefferson and the KKK in the 1930s (hosting “Free Speech Special” events).1From the mid-twentieth century onwards, suburbs with detached housing and oil-fuelled car culture signalled freedom of space and mobility built on colonialism and resource extraction. In Canada, images of mountains and landscapes signify settler freedom in our national mythology.

The fundamental incompatibility between capitalism and democracy—the exploitation of labour for surplus value, on the one hand, and power of the people on the other—has long been obfuscated by liberal discourses of self-determination and free individuals. Declarations of liberal freedom provide ideological cover for a system fundamentally predicated on particular inclusions and exclusions. Thus, “freedom” here is not an unfulfilled promise, but rather the very concept of freedom in the post-Enlightenment age is an abstraction—with real material effects—made possible by the violences and unfreedoms of racial capitalism. In Saidiya Hartman’s words, “The entanglements of bondage and liberty shaped the liberal imagination of freedom, fueled the emergence and expansion of capitalism, and spawned proprietorial conceptions of the self.”2 When freedom is defined in liberal individualist terms, it is necessarily founded on unfreedoms and provides ideological cover for the exploitations of racial capitalism.

Today we are experiencing what Antonio Gramsci termed an “organic crisis,” a crisis in multiple realms where liberal-capitalist hegemony itself is threatened.3 Discourses of freedom are being mobilized to maintain the illusion of the free liberal individual in the face of collective crises. Rather than focusing on the logical fallacies or hypocrisies of freedom or viewing freedom as a deferred ideal, I examine three deployments of anti-social freedom in our time as fulfilling particular obfuscatory functions: freedom of expression, academic freedom, and COVID-19 freedom.

In the summer of 2020, prominent members of the intelligentsia wrote an open letter in Harper’s Magazine asserting the “free exchange of information and ideas,” particularly during what they call a “moment of trial.” On the surface perhaps a laudable sentiment, the letter itself and its signatories claim this freedom without any analysis of who has access to it—who bears the brunt of the consequences of speech. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless.”4Social media in particular has for the first time enabled some (social, cultural, institutional) consequences for the powerful. In the Harper’s letter and other similar proclamations, freedom of speech is implicitly conscripted as a freedom from consequence. Of course, there does exist a real problem of state intervention on speech, the intervention of the powerful on the speech of those who critique power, such as censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.5 Yet the function of calling for free speech right now—when hegemony itself is threatened—is to erase relations of power. Another effect of this erasure is to delegitimize expertise: to declare that we are all individuals entitled to our own truth. This rhetoric supposes that critical race theorists and white genociders deserve equal access to platforms—and baldly serves the interests of racial capitalism. A stark example is the imposition of the “Chicago Principles” of free speech on post-secondary institutions in Alberta in an attempt to render the academy into a marketplace of ideas.6

Academic freedom is an important protection for researchers speaking truth to power without state censorship. With the recent examples of Cornel West and Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure on right-wing ideological grounds, along with the defunding or outright banning of critical disciplines such as gender studies by authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán7 and Jair Bolsonaro,8 academic freedom in the conventional understanding is indeed under threat. Yet the idea of freedom from state intervention or capitalist imperatives has always been a fantasy; for example, projects that partner with police and prisons receive more funding than abolitionist ones, and the prevalence of precarious contract work means even a tenuous version of academic freedom is only available to those few with permanent positions. In a recent example, University of Alberta anthropology professor Kathleen Lowrey9 placed transphobic materials on her door and was dismissed from her administrative position as undergraduate chair; the professor and her supporters bemoaned this as a violation of her academic freedom even though she maintains tenure and her professorial position. Academic freedom here is weaponized in service of unfreedom: the freedom to put transphobic materials on one’s door is predicated on the unfreedom of non-binary and trans students and staff who are confronted with it in their place of study and work, and the freedom to be an undergraduate chair who promotes transphobia is predicated on the unfreedom of the students in that department. Because racial capitalism is entwined with cisheternormativity, this example is more easily conscripted as an issue of academic freedom than, say, flat-Earth, which does not threaten capitalist hegemony—never mind that we also have ample research in humanities, social sciences, and biology that delegitimizes transphobia. Grace Lavery writes, “Academics deplatform each other routinely: every time a journal declines to publish an article, a student fails a class, or a book is left off a syllabus. The modern notion that every vapid provocateur deserves their moment in the scholarly limelight is a direct threat to academic freedom, not a defence of it.”10 The issue of academic freedom within our racial-capitalist system is never absolute, always a negotiation of multiple factors, so the question is how those negotiations are mediated. If the academy stands for everything in the name of academic freedom, then it stands for nothing. Moreover, it risks reproducing the very unfreedom it purportedly critiques.

The recent COVID-19 freedom discourse crystallizes the dynamic of freedom/unfreedom in racial capitalism. While these proclamations of freedom—from masks, vaccines, public health restrictions—occur in a somewhat different sphere of the public with different manifestations than the first two examples, they are all symptomatic of the same tensions. The mobilization of COVID-19 freedom is less obfuscated by liberal ideology, and indeed throws into relief the exclusionary unfreedoms of the other two examples. As a more transparent use of freedom as exclusion, COVID-19 freedom reveals the double-bind of capitalist freedom: those proclaiming COVID-19 freedom want to be free to exchange their labour for wages and free to get sick and die—or, more accurately, to let others die. As with the other forms of freedom, the problem here is one of individual versus collective freedom; whatever sense of belonging one may get from being at a COVID-19 freedom rally is predicated on the suffering and death of others. It is therefore no surprise that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, overseeing the decaying heart of Empire, proclaimed July 19 as “Freedom Day,” the day all public health restrictions were lifted as case counts were rising.

It is no accident that discourses of freedom abound along with the material reality of multiple crises. The wealth accumulation that buttressed liberal freedom is threatened by financial crashes and extreme inequality—and most starkly by potentially terminal ecological crisis. The centre cannot hold; polarization proliferates. The desperate gasps of liberalism manifest in perverse symptoms such as Biden-Harris’s “Build Back Better,” the fantasy of green capitalism, billionaires in space, and tokenistic representational politics. Our current crises threaten the hegemonic mobilization of freedom and unfreedom. Amidst all this, how might this threat provide an opening for reimagining more radical forms of collective freedom? The increased transparency of anti-social freedom may indeed signal its death knell rather than its reproduction.


Shama Rangwala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, and is currently located in amiskwaciwâskahikan, Treaty 6 territory. Her research takes a cultural studies perspective to examine the adaptations of racial capitalism in the settler-colonial context.

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