Defending the Right to Offend: A Critique of Western Discourse on Free Speech

This essay tries to critique the western discourse on free speech, based as it is on the binaries of liberal and illiberal spaces- and by implication races- from a postcolonial point of view and pin down its major flaws. The attempt here is to locate the genesis of this thinking in imperial mindset, conditioned by West’s inherited prejudices and motivated no less by its commercial logic. Accordingly, the essay argues absolute freedom to be a myth. Even in the so-called liberal democracies there exist institutional and non-institutional forms of curbs on people’s right to write and express themselves freely. To be sure, the quantum of freedom available to individuals and collectivities vary significantly in various contemporary societies. This has to do, as this essay argues, with a range of sociocultural factors but more significantly with the means at the society’s disposal to neutralize, domesticate, and co-opt dissenting voices and opinions. Furthermore, market and commercial forces play a decisive role in determining this freedom and its limits.

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