“Solidarity means running the same risk” — Ernesto Che Guevara via Augusto Boal

“So much rehabilitated and reconstructed into that goodness and perpetual innocence that whiteness extends.” Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes.

 

The Australian artistic and academic sectors are currently dismantling the career of Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, in the context of a civilisational or genocidal war against humanity currently being enacted by the Israeli nation-state with Western weapons in illegally occupied lands in Gaza, and an attendant culture war involving political repression of protest and a burgeoning discourse of anti- antisemitism in the West^[1].

In February 2025 Creative Australia rescinded Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino’s commission to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale after questions were raised in parliament by conservative senator Claire Chandler about the artist’s historical works such as You (2007), depicting Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and Thank You Very Much (2006) which included a montage of the 9/11 2001 attacks in the United States. In a joint letter to Creative Australia, myself and other chairs of CA-funded organisation boards noted that in sacrificing Sabsabi to their risk management of the national discourse in the lead-up to an election, Creative Australia essentially distributed political risk and an associated chilling effect on speech downward to its funded organisations^[2]. Any “taxpayer-funded” arts organisation is now an easy target whenever one of the many non-Jewish proponents of anti-anti-semitism discourse, particularly the new Zionist advocate Peter Dutton (before he was unceremoniously beaten in the federal election), see an opportunity to align with News Corp media outlets to target perceived leftist enemies to Judeo-Christian civilisation.^[3]

The well-known theorisation of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck in the 1990s pointed to how risk is “politically reflexive”: while needs can theoretically be satisfied, risks never disappear: they are only mitigated, ever threatening to return. “… Civilization risks are a bottomless barrel of demands, unsatisfiable, infinite, self-producible,” Beck notes. “Risk society is a catastrophic society. In it the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.” One can see here the expansive dynamics of terror inherent in risk management. Civilisationally, Spivak makes use of the psychoanalytic concept of foreclosure in describing denial as risk management in the colonial mindset, where when feeling fear in the face of a reality that contradicts one’s colonial world-view “the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all.” Colonial mentality’s risk management involves a constant state of defense against bad feelings returning, with the barbarian at home or abroad framed as the civilisational threat at the source.

As Angela Mitropolous and Melinda Cooper have outlined, the concept of risk emerges in relation to early modern forms of maritime insurance, but this mathematisation soon reveals a duality: risks are insurable or non-insurable. For insurable risk, prior statistical data is processed into a ratio of more or less manageable probabilities, but always shadowing this prediction is the potential of “uncertainty” that can occur when the probabilistic ratios no longer operate, where the producer of the ratio is unable to feel certain about the likelihood of arrival of the danger, and in this case risks become uninsurable. For Cooper, the development of the modern European-style social welfare state was essentially a national project of collectivising and standardising societal risk in a form that renders it insurable. The more recent neoliberal decomposition of social democracy contains no collective belief in the possibility of social security, but instead valorises “the positivity of danger, the catalytic effects of catastrophe and the subjective necessity of exposure,” realities to which Indigenous peoples were of course already subjected through the time of dominance of the liberal democratic order. For the default citizen, neoliberalism newly disavows any social ratio of insurance and makes the individual the formulator of their own risk management strategy for which they can be responsible. In Cooper’s view, this mode of governance sharply distinguishes between “those who are ‘at risk’ and those who ‘pose a risk’, or perhaps those who are uninsured and those who cannot be insured against.” This last formulation resonates with Mitropoulos’ writing about risk in mandatory detention and border policing, where the “archipelago of risk” involves “the correlation of otherwise uncorrelated frequencies of event distribution and speculations on the future in bounded sets of comparable but diverse times that generates value.” In other words, the border system and its various states of exception can make someone money as long as “the plausible depiction of imagined threats” to the nation is maintained.

Immediately before the Sabsabi affair, this cultural logic of threat production was on display in The Australian’s attacks on Professor Chelsea Watego, Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, and Sarah Schwartz after the National Symposium Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action at QUT in Magandjin/Brisbane in January, highlighting the need in conservative racial politics for a consistent delegitimation of Palestinian, Arab, Indigenous and anti-Zionist Jewish voices.

The Sabsabi incident arrived into a politically charged context in the arts: since October 2023 a number of arts organisations made public statements condemning the escalation of crimes against humanity in Gaza by Israel after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, and others were critiqued for their silence and for their alignment with philanthropy connected to the Israeli nation state or pro-Zionist individuals or organisations — which commonly went hand in hand.^[4] The revocation of Sababis’s invitation, however, appeared to galvanise a broader arts community concerned with questions of artistic voice and autonomy, even though many were not necessarily familiar with Sabsabi’s back catalogue, due to his context of work often being in communities in Western Sydney and therefore not always given visibility in the most prominently funded urban artistic arenas.

For those of us in academic roles, one hoped that the University environment would respond to these attacks with a stronger commitment to freedom of expression and critical interrogation of the grounds of political censorship. However, in March Monash University followed Creative Australia’s lead with an “indefinite postponement” of the Stolon Press exhibition Flat Earth which included Sabsabi, due to a “need for the Museum to deepen its collaboration and engagement on this exhibition.” Note the logic, not of cancellation — which would require the University to take responsibility for the decision and its framing — but instead placing the museum into a bureaucratic purgatory where unspecified amounts of compliance to avoid the perception of antisemitism will be required in order for the exhibition to go ahead. The strategy mimics that proposed by right-wing ideologues such as the American Heritage Institute who propose a “never-ending compliance review” in their comprehensive plan to rein in University autonomy.

Universities are places where concepts are ideally produced through the critical application of expert knowledge and debate, and both the swiftness and non-discursiveness of the decision-making reflects a continuing trend of risk management strategies that by definition silence the critical activity that is the university’s historical function.^[5] In 2023, for example, the University of Melbourne — where I work — adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, with little support from academics Jewish or otherwise, and deliberately sidelining long standing academic debates, particularly among Jewish intellectuals, of what constitutes racism and the degree to which a nation state can claim to represent a cultural or religious tradition.^[6] As the University institutions pursue the insulation of their own practice from the academic knowledge it houses and sells, it has fallen to students to fight for universities to remain accountable their core values of knowledge-based dialogue and debate. It is primarily due to student protests that the University of Melbourne has undertaken to, some day, disclose its investments in weapons manufacture.

As any observer of the state of universities internationally is aware, there is nothing specifically Australian about the treatment of Sabsabi by Monash University. Anti antisemitism is now the most prominent rationale for attacks on the autonomy of Anglophone universities, in a McCarthyist logic of expansion echoing Beck’s analysis of the inexhaustible character of civilisational risk. The Trump administration in the United States announced that it would remove $US 400 million of government funding from Columbia University due to their “failure to protect students from antisemitism,” despite the University having unleashed the most aggressive responses to pro-Palestine student protests in the nation — including inviting police to disperse non-violent protest on campus. The administration also pursued the detention and deportation of Palestinian Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil in another clear example-setting exercise highlighting their power and lack of regard for due process. Columbia’s prompt caving to Trump’s demands of compliance to receive the funding, of course, achieved nothing: interim President Dr. Katrina Armstrong, who presided over the policy changes, soon stepped down after private suggestions they might slow-walk their compliance were leaked.

Once again, these crises are designed by their perpetrators to distribute risk to the rest of the sector. Where one might have expected a university like Columbia to advocate against the illegal detention of one of its students, the corporate university sees human rights as an area of study that can be productised for student consumers, rather than a value that might be upheld in its operations.^[7]

While Australian universities are not governed by unaccountable boards of trustees like US institutions, the financialisation of their dealings creates an environment of risk management that is modelled on the corporate form. The dominance of government funding in the Australian system also presents itself now as a substantial risk: the institution where I work would be the most likely to be able to weather a withholding of public funds, but it would still be far worse than the situation at any large private university in the US that it considers a rankings peer. And as Harvard University is finding out, even the largest private endowment in the world does not insulate institutions from other mechanisms of authoritarian government control, such as through student visa revocations.

One can see why the contemporary art context, a more public environment for composing voice, would be particularly galvanised by Sabsabi’s deplatforming. The key element distinguishing artistic research from scientific research is the degree to which it takes place in public venues that also function as a specialist community of artistic practice. By contrast, other disciplines have to engage in “research translation” out of the ivory tower. Compared to most university disciplines, artists are involved through their work in the dominant public cultural forms of the day, such as social media, where the horror in Gaza is live-streamed into our mobile devices. On such platforms the spatial logics of visibility and speech — amplification, platforming, statements — amount to an economy of their own in the vast and immediate distribution of gesture and event ubiquitous personal computing technologies provide.

The 1990-2000s versions of contemporary art in the Biennale era took the legacies of new genre public art or “social practice” into what Suhail Malik called the “neo-realist maxim” that anything can and should be viewed in an artistic context as a platform of public participation, echoing a Beuysian dictate that each person is an artist. Now, each social media profile is the artist, with similar responsibilities of speech as the entry price of participation: unlike a physical environment, just showing up on a social media platform would not constitute participation, but would be simply lurking. As the social internet is built on a voluntaristic model of labour atop a corporate resource base constructed at distance from the state, it is a natural home to compositions of individual voice in the Euro-American art context, which operates on similar privatised governance structure. Yet, these media of expression have also functioned as new opportunities for state and corporate surveillance against protest and dissent, placing the traditional European equation of speech with democratic participation into an environment with little in-built protection for individuals or opportunities for due process.

In the case of the Sabsabi decision, the art criticism publication Memo Review was the first to give visibility to the widespread outrage in the sector, hosting an open letter with over 4000 signatories. It is hard to know to what extent the broad appeal of the letter is due to the timing — it appeared the day after the Creative Australia decision — or the fact that it doesn’t mention race, Gaza or Palestine. Likely both are important. Nevertheless, it showcased a demand for voice which was not met by other institutional environments. Memo was then ideally placed to give further dialogue with a “panel on the cancellations of artist Khaled Sabsabi and its implications for artistic freedom, censorship, and institutional risk”, hosted at the Greek Centre on April 7 2025 and situating Sabsabi’s cancellations against “a backdrop of mounting political pressure and an increasingly volatile international climate, with a very real rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism.” At stake, for the organisers, “are not only principles of anti-racism and free expression, but the institutional conditions that make such expression possible” — although one might note that anti-racism has not been a strong point of an artistic sector due to its natural alliance with Western civilisational institutions and its methodological individualism.

The Forum was booked out many times over, with a reported 600 people on a waiting list the Friday before the Monday event that hosted 200 in the Greek Centre in Melbourne, and the hosting here by Nikos Papastergiadis was perhaps the most decisive gesture of the forum at a time when many institutional arrangements are unwilling to provide a forum for debate.

I won’t spend time discussing the many interesting elements of the forum proper as the recording is available on the Memo website. It opened with Khaled Sabsabi’s gallerist, Josh Milani, who noted that in twelve years of representing Khaled Sabsabi’s work, the lack of engagement from national collecting institutions reflects an “unconscious institutional bias” and that the attacks on Sabsabi were not to do with his works, but due to Sabsabi being an Australian Muslim artist at a time of heightened social tension.

Art historian Anthony Gardner, an industry advisor to Creative Australia who was consulted on Khaled Sabsabi’s selection for Venice, noted the “weaponised use of care and community” in the justifications for the cancellation and asked us all to place Khaled Sabsabi in “every show and every text,” flooding the sector with Sabsabi’s work. Louise Adler suggested that the Zionist lobby is cut from the same ideological cloth as other powerful lobbies such as big pharma and the mining industry, and their campaign against anti-semitism through the News Corp press is a strategy to deflect from the “live streamed genocide in Gaza.” Adler noted the attention in the Creative Australia release to “social cohesion” — a term which presents itself as being in service of the social but is “banality through misdirection”, suppressing debate in the social world.

For Ghassan Hage, it is important to be clear that the censorship is not generic but directed against Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices first. In the standard politics of multiculturalism, we should have engaged in an argument about the ethnicisation of Khaled Sabsabi through the national selection and questioned the instrumentalisation of Sabsabi for social ends by the state that threatened to “steal his opportunity to be universal”. But this is not the debate we’re having — instead it’s a situation of war, and after 30-40 years of the Australian multicultural state patting itself on the back for managing the integration of migrants, now there is no longer integration but a de-integration: “Some people are too integrated, they feel too much at home, how can we make them feel not at home.”

For artist and writer Azza Zein, the removal of Khaled Sabsabi’s exhibition opportunities are “an act of censorship rooted in racialised assumptions.” Zein noted that the racial dynamics are something that racialised artists are used to encountering in white art institutions all the time, but that this moment is “making them visible”. Zein clarified by noting the distinctive problematic for racialised artists, where the institutions “want cultural reproduction from us, anything beyond this is deemed dangerous.” Artists with accountabilities outside the Australian art scene also have to “talk to the places we come from which talks about those politics in a more complex way” than white art institutions’ accountability affords.

*

If it had all ended there, all might have been as everyone involved had hoped and I might not be writing this essay. However, the question-and-answer period that came next is worth discussing. The recording of this part of the evening was not placed on the Memo website — probably because it was, to put it colloquially, a shitshow, although an instructive one where the residual alliance of the contemporary art world to liberal conceptions of individual signature and subjectivity was on display.

Memo co-moderator Paris Lettau presented the first question for the panel, asking “do we really have to choose between defending freedom of expression and fighting racism?” — an opposition all the panellists had taken care to avoid. Hage and Zein had noted that the censorship under discussion was not generic but rooted in racialised assumptions, and perhaps inadvertently this frame, coming directly after Zein’s highly integrated account of the questions of voice and cultural power, highlighted the problems of contemporary art’s traditional lack of engagement with the issues artists associated with “multicultural” communities face in their work.

Turning to the audience for questions, the co-moderator Helen Hughes expressed the forum’s risk management strategy, where audience questions were requested to be routed through the Memo website, to avoid Q&A being able to become a platform for derailing — a valid concern after the events in Brisbane and other situations where actions had been undertaken for the purposes of media coverage.

Unfortunately, rather than being hijacked by right-wing provocateurs, the dialogue decomposed for more banal and familiar reasons. It was senior white curatorial and academic voices who failed to follow the protocol, taking the floor for themselves and quickly turning the discussion into their shared lived experience of prior Venice selection processes and what they perceived as procedural issues in the Sabsabi appointment (although they were briefly corrected by a former employee of Creative Australia, reminding everyone that it was identical to the process that resulted in Archie Moore and Ellie Buttrose’s nomination for 2024). This dialogue further took the conversation away from the racial underpinnings of the conflict diagnosed by Hage and Zein, returning to dynamics of individual voice and government responsibility, resulting in a back and forth that seemed to offer little other than narratives of self-justification for the speakers.

The discussion of the 2019 instance of Australia’s participation at Venice somewhat gallingly included, without naming explicitly, the unsuccessful proposal from Richard Bell, who was in the room. The discussion reiterated ongoing cultural politics of who is given and denied voice, and to a certain innocence in a white art community that has naturally seen the mechanisms of government and capital as potentially underwriting artistic speech. Meanwhile, those from racialised communities, slowly admitted to national cultural life under discourses of multiculturalism and now optics of diversity and inclusion, have, like Zein, more commonly diagnosed a continuity of their experience of whiteness in the art world and other worlds. The kinds of exceptionalism granted to white artists as contributors to the cultural sector have only been extended provisionally to others. The panel moderators seemed not to have the authority to rein in the conversation that went outside the announced protocol for the evening.

A final intervention from a younger, self-identified person of colour brought the short Q&A to a close by upbraiding these off-piste interventions (“I don’t know who you are” earned an audience chuckle for the succinct puncturing of the obnoxious self-assumed right to break the protocol with their own voice), and gave a confident if generic critique of the normative investments in liberalism common to institutional contexts that postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has sought to prise apart. After the tiresome back and forth that preceded it, a certain relief was palpable in the audience that what is today a more contemporary discourse of cultural politics was able to enter the room.

The intervention pointed also to a generational shift in discourse, where attention to one’s own involvement in platforms and networks subtends positions of speech, and the idea of a reserved space for art in its historical mode as the natural staging ground for critique by self-appointed entrepreneurs holds little sway. Perhaps relatedly, the generational shift in discourses of Palestine solidarity has emphasised the transition from rights-based questions of territoriality and European norms of human rights toward logics of settler coloniality, and a recognition that the occupation of Palestine is a European problem — inaugurated by the Balfour Declaration as a solution to the continent’s antisemitism at the expense of Palestinian peoples — and therefore something which is in continuity with cultural politics in the lands now known as Australia.

If there was a curatorial misstep that can be attributed to the panel hosts, it would be the failure to include First Nations perspectives. As we have seen, First Nations artists not only know better than anyone all the logics that have animated the Sabsabi decision, but they have also been Sabsabi’s clearest supporters, as with Daniel Browning being the first media figure Sabsabi spoke with after a long silence.

Of course, the Memo team admitted they were working quickly, and given the immense enthusiasm for the event, the opportunity to galvanise the community probably required compromises when people are unavailable. Anyone who works in Southeast Australia is also aware that the demand for First Nations voices at non-Aboriginal events is high, so I’m not suggesting they wouldn’t have tried. Still, my sense of the current expectation that Indigenous voices are essential in modes of public debate is not only about politeness or demand for content as historical reparation through representation, but also a practical recognition that such voices locate us in structures of governance and accountability that can make shameless point-scoring debates uninflected by the history of the land we are on less likely.

Whenever we talk in Southeastern Australia on any matters of cultural politics, particularly in relationship to a settler-colonial and ultimately “civilisational” conflict initiated by the West as in Palestine, we are speaking to it on a land where a version of the genocidal logic taking place in Gaza has already been enacted on Aboriginal communities here. Those of us from a white context who operate in the cultural frame that has systematically dismantled Indigenous governance are all beneficiaries of that logic, no matter where our stated alliances rest today.

This reality, and the problems that revealed themselves in the panel Q&A when it is avoided, should give us pause when staging our own response to events that address issues of structural racism and coloniality. Any of us working in the arts or the academy should — as Zein suggested — be uncomfortable with the unfolding ideological drive that is justifying both innocent death in the world and the simple denial of livelihood for Sabsabi as an artist. Our solidarity is solicited and should be extended. But if we are unable to take stock of how civilisational risk is unevenly distributed through our own actions where we live, or where colonial logics of voice and visibility are repeated through our own protocols, our urgent actions may do less repair of immediate problems than we expect.

All of the European-style infrastructure of art and academia exists in these lands through a settler-colonial occupation that continues to inflict its largest injustices on Aboriginal Australians. Critics have noted that artistic philanthropy associated with Israel, prominent in Australia, has had an interest in supporting First Nations cultural production, as long as this production expresses no solidarity with human rights in Palestine. Yet an uncomfortable truth is that for those of us native to local institutions of settler-colonial culture, our perspective on the Israeli nation-state’s genocidal activity is caught in the same relations of complicity, to the degree to which we are unable to meaningfully undo the effects of genocidal logic in our own environment that underwrites our ability to speak.

What if the Sabsabi decisions are not, as most art world voices seem comfortable framing it, an overturning of fundamental values of artistic autonomy and rights, but are instead a marker of the continuing collapse of state-sponsored institutional liberal multicultural formations that promised “diversity and inclusion” under a naturalised ideology of Western capital? First Nations critics have consistently articulated that rights were only tentatively and provisionally extended outside of the white middle classes, and only where there was no perceived risk to the dominant social order. Under these conditions, our perceptions of solidarity might have to extend outside traditional disciplinary and professional constraints of art and academia, and this would make compromises on the composition of voice less acceptable, as our own organisation of that inclusive frame is what is in question.

In the visual arts sector, where contractual free agency is the norm and labour organisation is weak, it is curatoriality, rather than DEI, that is the dominant mode of cultural risk management, instituting a space of mediation between financial operations and artistic interventions^[8]. As a serial mode of selection, rather than ongoing commitment, curatorial programming brings the opportunity to enter into optical alliances with artists associated with specific communities, without needing to commit to those communities in an ongoing way. The mode here is adopted from academic research, where the ethnographic enterprise pioneered the institutional staging of temporary relationships with others with little accountability to their ongoing survival.^[9]

Memo understood that programming Arab and Jewish voices on this panel was necessary to begin to engage the racial and cultural dynamics that ultimately led to Sabasbi’s removal. A cynical analysis might suggest a certain level of risk management is engaged in this composition, but I prefer to read it as an attempt to reckon with the underlying questions of the composition of voice which are intersectionally understood to be essential to diversify in escaping art’s historical blind spots. Nevertheless, without a critique of our own complicity in artistic and academic sectors that are constructed through white middle class norms, are going to struggle to foster relationships of genuine accountability and solidarity required in the long task of repairing the colonial ruptures in the lands where we exist.

*

In her 1994 essay “Responsibility”, Spivak takes to task those refusing to read Derrida’s injunction that Martin Heidegger was not simply a Nazi, but someone conditioned by a repressive environment who developed deliberate habits of avoidance of certain classes of problems in his philosophical work. These habits laid the groundwork for the denial of responsibility that allowed him to join the Nazi Party during his brief period in the Rectorate at the University of Freiburg in 1933-34. For Spivak and Derrida, Heidegger’s itinerary is important for those of us seeking the survival of institutions and our own role in them during repressive times. Heidegger’s assumption that he could play to the Nazi line didn’t last long, as those in power saw that, among other things, his refusal to dismiss Jewish professors meant that he didn’t subscribe to the Party’s core values. As a consequence, he was removed from his role in a year. After trying to keep his head down, he was not exempted from military service and eventually sent up the Rhine to build fortifications at the end of the war. The repressive state has no use for thinkers, even quiet and compliant ones.

Antonio Gramsci identified that intellectuals, academic or artistic, are typically insulated from the everyday experience of risk that people live. For Gramsci, unless we find an organic connection to cultural forms in marginalised classes, our attempts to lead change will always fail — if not always as catastrophically as Heidegger. And under conditions of war, the luxury of relative detachment for the non-combatant vanishes quickly.

In the current mode of civilisational warfare that Hage elaborated from Bourdieu, the synoptic state/capital-sponsored accommodations of pluralism and cosmopolitanism reveal themselves to have always been reliant on fragile conditions of relative peace established by an occupying colonial power, and the price of peace for the middle class artist-intellectual would be the systematic avoidance of First Nations perspectives incompatible with that bargain. Here it is time to recognise that unless we engage the racism and civilisationalism in our own thinking and institutional structures, we will continue to further distribute that risk to others with whom we hope to extend solidarity toward. Attending to the horror of contemporary genocide is, as it should be for any human, important, as is standing up for artists who have had an unjust dismantling of their career through association. But in doing so we also need to find ways to allow the calls to responsibility from peoples directly marginalised by our own complicity to be part of our overall composition of activity.

The value of the Memo forum and the broader potential of artistic discourse, perhaps, is that the implicit protocols that allow art to operate in non-accountable relations of privilege and white supremacy do mean that there is the potential for an unmanaged breakdown of protocol, even if unconsciously.^[10] Where these cracks in the discourse of pluralist cultural managerialism occur is, for Spivak, where the potential exists for recognition of responsibility to arrive from outside our bubble, and therefore where the potential of critical remaking of solidarity lies. The Memo forum highlighted how, decades into post-biennial discourses of multiculturalism, and after at least a decade of growth in “decolonial” art criticism, there is no solving the racial contradictions of art in the settler colony from within the established dominant positions of voice. These are interdisciplinary problems, and generational questions, and perhaps intersectionality and the attendant diversity of voice are the progressive formulations of interdisciplinarity today.

As Fanon signalled, a genuine opportunity to resolve the contradictions of systemic privilege would likely involve the dismantling of the entire infrastructure of white supremacy — including our own institutions and our modes of subjective comportment in nominally “non-institutional” zones like the art world where we fantasize we are evading the problem. How prepared are we, collectively, to interrogate all the ways our institutions of the academy and art, in their historical white supremacy and habits of avoidance, distribute risk to others?

The structural challenges of dominant voice and protocol in the Memo forum and the Q&A suggests that the persecution of Sabsabi and his people is likely to continue to be the price of retention of the remains of the liberal aesthetic order. Part of the problem in the white artistic context is that, due to the essentially vitalist liberal culture underpinning its operations, people are scared of their own professional death and the only way to ward this off is by making something ”good” happen in a secular protestant logic of instrumental activism.

In the academy, by some contrast, a critical philosophical genre of accountability to an archive potentially allows us to see our own death as clearing the way for others, as generational change does not necessarily involve dispensing with the past. Still, while the academy might be up for that existential challenge in terms of its own disciplines, it has no clear basis or will to confront the multi-faceted threat to its survival being currently pursued through political means. What is true across both sectors is that the linguistic innovations that have been our habit of the last few decades on managing cultural complexity — whether in technocratic managerialism or purported allyship —are being overtaken by an increasingly active repressive state/capital alliance, which no longer has interest in how our discourses are framed except to find excuses for destruction of the possibility of discourse in general. How we forge effective resistance to that logic of war is a deep challenge, and the energy around the Memo forum, whatever its limitations, potentially risked gestures of solidarity that pointed to new collaborations for artistic dialogue.

This review essay was written in response to an invitation from Creative Matters, the online publication of The Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts, for their issue on “risk”, however as the essay developed it far exceeded the scope and word count appropriate for that context. I am grateful for the suggestion of editor Smiljana Glisovic to publish in full elsewhere, and to Overland for accepting the essay for publication, which seems like an ideal venue given Overland’s consistent and substantial analysis of the implications of Palestine for Australian cultural production. I thank the many people who have commented on previous versions of this essay — they have greatly improved it and allowed me to avoid the worst implications of my subjective blind spots that were present in earlier drafts, of course all errors remaining are my own.

^[1] On the use of the term genocide, including the tensions between legal and non-legal definitions, see Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent”; Moses, “The Problems of Genocide Need to Be Taken Seriously”; and Albanese, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure — Report of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967”. On anti-anti semitism in the German context, an instructive conversation is Denvir, “The German Question w/ Emily Dische-Becker.”

^[2] As Micaela Sahhar has noted, “rather than peace, the country is in pursuit of an alarming sort of quiet.”

^[3] Many eloquent defenses of Sabsabi’s work have shown the claims are baseless. Sabsabi has pointed to the dismantling of his career that Creative Australia’s decision has undertaken in an interview with Daniel Browning. On the underlying dynamics of Dutton’s use of anti-semitism, see Sarah Schwartz, “When Peter Dutton and the Coalition Use the Jewish Community as Political Footballs It Makes All of Us Less Safe.”

^[4] For a wide-ranging account of the implications of the silence from a feminist academic perspective, see Shoman et al, “Feminist Silences in the Face of Israel’s Genocide against the Palestinian People: A Call for Decolonial Praxis against Complicity.”

^[5] In an alternate version of this essay, it would be interesting to expand on the way which University risk-management insulates itself from academic discourse on risk-management, such as used by the business school academics who train the corporate consultants who advise on organisational operations of the University, but these academics are typically held at a distance. See for example Campbell and Morrissey, The People’s Tribunal: An Inquiry into the “Business Improvement Program” at The University of Melbourne. The same can be said of academic knowledge related to all the corporate infrastructure in the contemporary universities, including information technology; property services; investment; accounting; branding; compliance; workplace education; and, increasingly, health and wellbeing. For an influential example of the kind of detailed yet pragmatic analysis of risk management that is commonly taught academically but would be anathema to the university’s risk management professionals, see Klinke and Renn, “A New Approach to Risk Evaluation and Management: Risk-Based, Precaution-Based, and Discourse-Based Strategies”.

^[6] For an analysis of the IHRA definition’s expansion, see Israeli professor Neve Gordon, “Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the IHRA Definition”.

^[7] My own institution, the University of Melbourne, has recently announced measures aimed at suppressing protest in the light of 2024’s campus occupation including what the Human Rights Law Centre describes as “ill-defined restrictions on all protests at the University, including a ban on indoor protests, and amendments to its Wireless Terms of Use policy which permits the surveillance of all users without any suspicion of wrongdoing or misuse of the network.” See eg Bates, “University of Melbourne Urged to Drop Repressive Anti-Protest and Surveillance Policies”. A petition from staff, students and alumni is currently circulating.

^[8] My work with Rachel O’Reilly frames this analysis of the curatorial: see O’Reilly and Butt, “Desedimentation, Delamination, Deconstruction: Boycotts Unseen or That Never Eventalize”v

^[9] Evergreen articulations are Trask, “Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle” and Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. See also Tuck and Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research?”

^[10] Here I am invoking the argumentation of Marina Vishmidt: “Art’s uselessness can actually as well as potentially constitute a source of antagonism in a society of value… allow[ing] this dialectic to become visible in a way that can-not apply to other sites of critical educational – or professional – practice, where this kind of disjunction between form and content is programmatically subsumed into the tenets of service or professionalism: in other words, where the use-value of an education or a practice can never be seriously questioned.” Vishmidt’s dialectic ties art’s visibility to its political lack of agency, noting that to mend this “we would have to return to the substantive Marxist question of the revolutionary determinations stemming from given roles in the relations of production or, in other terms, the relationship between technical and political composition.” Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital.