Wasafiri

Published online: 18 Feb 2026.

ISSN: 0269-0055 (Print) 1747-1508 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rwas20
The Ethics of Erasure: On the Practice and Politics of Cultural Expression
Anshuman A Mondal
To cite this article: Anshuman A Mondal (2026) The Ethics of Erasure: On the Practice and Politics of Cultural Expression, Wasafiri, 41:1, 40-52, DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2026.2578915 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2026.2578915
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THE ETHICS OF ERASURE: ON THE PRACTICE
AND POLITICS OF CULTURAL EXPRESSION
ANSHUMAN A MONDAL

WASAFIRI /VOLUME41/ NUMBER 1/ ISSUE 125/ MARCH 2026 / PAGE 40–52 / © 2026 THE AUTHOR(S). PUBLISHED BY INFORMA UK
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Erasure. Nobody likes it, least of all those of us who are concerned with expression in its many forms. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the kind of erasure that is positioned within Western culture as the antithesis to expression has a very bad reputation. I would hazard a guess that these days all its social, political, and cultural connotations and associations are entirely negative, given that we are living in a cultural moment characterised by what political philosopher Wendy Brown, as long ago as 1998, has called ‘compulsory discursivity’ (315). In this essay, I would like to offer a different perspective, one that dismantles this binary opposition between expression and erasure. In so doing, I want to suggest that erasure, far from being expression’s antithesis, is, in fact, its secret twin, lurking in the shadows of articulation, silently shaping what is said, what is not said, what can be said, and what is – sometimes metaphorically, but also sometimes quite literally – unspeakable. Moreover, it is not only an inevitable and necessary part of expression itself, but also has some positive value with respect to cultural politics, and thence to politics in general. This, in turn, enables us to see how a dialectic between expression and erasure is at work across social scales, from the minutiae of linguistic and cultural practice, through to the larger socio-political erasures associated with, arising from, and contributing to the great historical injustices pertaining to gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. An acknowledgement that every act of expression is always-also an act of erasure is an invitation to wrestle with the complex demands of an ethics capable of understanding and responding to what is at stake in the practice and politics of cultural expression.
ON ERASURE
Erasure is so deeply embedded in our daily practices that it is largely invisible, banal even. Take, for instance, the provision of student reading lists. Those of us who teach are so intimately familiar with this practice that we are perhaps unaware of the stakes involved in reviewing and updating them each year. We know we cannot include everything. Multiple pressures shape our choices: principally, time (we only have x number of weeks to teach the course; students only have a finite amount of time to read the texts), but also cost, availability, and our own limits of expertise, familiarity, taste, and affect. Behind each selection of a text, then, lies a hinterland of paths not taken, terrain not crossed. This cohort of invisibilities – this mass of silent erasures – is much vaster and more heterogenous than what is expressed, and they shape (in ways that we are both conscious and unconscious of) what is seen on the reading list, what is read by our students, and what is discussed in the classroom.
Or take the act of writing itself. There is not a writer of any kind, alive or dead, who has not wrestled with and enacted erasure. This may be a banal point, but genetic criticism, for instance, has acknowledged its critical importance for our understanding of literary creativity, and has developed increasingly sophisticated and complex methodologies to pay due attention to the ways in which textual erasures shape literary texts. This is a challenge heightened by the emergence and dominance of ‘born digital’ texts, which obscure these editorial interventions even more effectively (Hulle).1
Indeed, the making visible of those erasures, which ordinarily remain invisible in the act of 
representation, is a literary technique with a long pedigree, stretching back, within the ken of my knowledge, to Tristram Shandy in the English literary tradition (Sterne and Anderson). But it has always been, and remains to this day, an avant-garde tactic designed to disrupt representational practices (such as ‘realism’) that conventionally obscure the many acts of erasure that lie secreted within the text. Here, for instance, is a passage from Tessa McWatt’s recent book, The Snag (2025):
I take out my notebook.
I want to be a panther. Or a hawk. But my writer’s nature engages in seeing things others pay no attention to.
Writing is rewriting, is repetition.
Of horror and beauty too.
This will sound silly. I want to bring out my tree nature.
Perhaps
There’s a place for the writer as hawk-eyed witness. in the new communism
A clear and precise ritual: to use repeatition, and representation of beauty, of horror, of to reconcileiation, of harmony.
Writing as prayer.
This will sound ridiculous.
I want to be a tree. (192)
There is a stylistic drama being enacted here between what is/will be expressed and what is/will be erased. The reader is being deliberately made privy to the movement from the shape of expression in the author’s notebook (right down to the misspellings, and the contours of a thought being inscribed as it takes form, unfinished and unpolished), to the putative form of an eventual published version. The twist is that this movement is ironically revealed through the marking of the erasures themselves when, ordinarily, the absence of such marks would render it invisible because the erased text those marks highlight would be absent. By drawing attention to the erasures, the passage highlights their hidden presence behind what might have been the published version of the text.
However, the significance of acknowledging the everyday necessity of erasure on the shaping of expression is wider and much more profound than simply tracing various versions of particular texts and their relation to their published forms of expression. Take the wider issue of editorial practice, which, in its various forms, is perhaps the one that we, as scholars, writers, critics, and teachers, are most accustomed to: the mark of the red pen, the subtle or not-so-subtle reshaping of the text through marginal comment or suggestion (or, indeed, at times, mandate), the dialogic to-and-fro between author and editor (or tutor, or supervisor) that wrestles with both the form and content of expression. These are underwritten at all times by a web of power relations between the interlocutors that may shift profoundly over the course of time, but which are never absent. We might compare, for example, the experience of a debut author with that of a hugely successful writer who has sold thousands of books and won many literary prizes. That celebrated writer would, at some point, have been a debut author; the power relation between them and their editor, publisher, reviewers, and readers would have been different at various points in their career. These fluctuations determine how the author’s texts are shaped before and after publication.
Other kinds of editorial interventions shape expression at a wider social level too. The adoption of school textbooks in the United States is one example. Whilst the politics underlying this pedagogical practice have become increasingly visible since the emergence of the Civil Rights and second-wave feminist movements – and indeed the subsequent ‘New Right’ (and latterly alt-right) backlash to them – it is, in fact, a practice dating back to the nineteenth century. And it involved both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ interventions seeking to impose their politically validated erasures on what schoolchildren can or cannot read within the classroom. This, in turn, determines and profoundly shapes the pedagogical choices of their schools and teachers (Mondal, ‘Shape’).
Because the US school textbooks market is not like a normal market but, in fact, akin to a government procurement process conducted ‘by elected officials who need to satisfy their constituents in order to retain their positions’, publishers must go to great lengths and expense ‘to produce material that will be considered non-controversial by the widest range of readers’ (Taylor 16–17). There is, in fact, no guarantee that their texts will be adopted. As a result, editors of these textbooks (for most of us, the Norton Anthology may be most familiar) are furnished with ‘complex lists of content guidelines to assist [them] … in their attempt to toe the line between what liberal and conservative protestors deem acceptable’ (Taylor 16–17). The flow of public discourse – what is and is not expressed – is then profoundly shaped by accommodations and negotiations that are ultimately as rooted in the mundane considerations of profit and loss as the moral sensitivities of the respective political antagonists.
These examples, taken from different social scales and historical contexts, all serve to demonstrate a general underlying truth about cultural expression: that it is the outcome of a dialectic between expression and erasure. So, we need to be open about the closures on expression that silently shape it. It is one of the great ironies that this is perhaps most eloquently acknowledged by the writer who has come to be associated with the most uncompromising currents of contemporary thought when it comes to insisting on absolute, limitless openness of expression, namely Salman Rushdie. ‘Every story one chooses to tell,’ he writes in Shame, ‘is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales’ (Rushdie 71). To be more precise, what we have to acknowledge is that all expression, all signification, is determined and often overdetermined by a whole set of social practices. As such, it is deeply regulated by norms, conventions, and other (usually less than formal) rules through which this dialectic plays out, through which language not only ‘does’ things, but also signifies and thus helps (or hinders) communication. Furthermore, this dialectic between expression and erasure aligns with another that is also customarily seen as being antithetical within the dominant paradigms of liberal political philosophy, and that continues to structure the social imaginaries of liberal democratic societies: the apparently binary opposition between ‘openness’ and ‘closure’. Within these liberal political paradigms, ‘freedom’ is aligned with ‘openness’, and its opposite (unfreedom, tyranny, oppression) with ‘closure’.2 I shall return, in due course, to the wider significance of this homology between expression–erasure/open- ness–closure/freedom–unfreedom, and how my argument draws this conceptual architecture into question. For now, however, I want simply to note the key implication for my argument thus far, namely that to speak openly – that is, ‘freely’ – does not mean to speak ‘without closure’.
Although these erasures or closures that shape expression may be largely invisible and apparently amorphous, they are not ad hoc, random, or simply a matter of individual choice or preference; rather, they are structured by underlying relations of power that determine and shape the normative frameworks through which such acts of everyday erasure are carried out. These structures may be more or less rigid depending on the precise contexts in which they bear down on the choices made at any given point, choices which may be felt and intuited rather than consciously deployed — apprehended as opposed to comprehended. But they are nevertheless always- already shaping the act of expression. Raymond Williams was trying to make a similar, albeit adjacent, point when he coined the term ‘structure of feeling’ to account for the ways in which ideology works to invisibly shape our thoughts, expressions, and feelings.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF ERASURE
What, then, is at stake when everyday erasures intersect with larger historical ones? The aforementioned adoption of US school textbooks is one example. But I want to dwell a little on another case, which demonstrates how the minutiae of linguistic practice are bound up with wider historical forces.
In her prize-winning novel, The Secret River (2006), Kate Grenville retells the story of her distant ancestor, a man called Solomon Wiseman, who was transported in the early nineteenth century as a convict to Australia and eventually managed to secure a plot of land that became the town known today as Wiseman’s Ferry. This made him an incredibly wealthy man, one of the wealthiest in Australia at the time. On one level, this is a rags-to-riches story, echoing that of Magwitch in Great Expectations (2008). But this is also a novel about one of the great historical erasures of the modern period, that of the Aboriginal peoples from modern Australian history. This is an erasure that, in some places, assumed physical form in genocide, and in mass displacement or forced assimilation for others: what Patrick Wolfe has called settler colonialism’s ‘logic of elimination’.
The title of Grenville’s novel alludes to a seminal moment in Australia’s ‘history wars’, an early prelude to the wider ‘culture wars’ of our present moment (Kossew 9). In 1968, the anthropologist Bill Stanner delivered the prestigious Boyer lecture, broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and modelled on the BBC’s Reith lectures. Titled ‘After the Dreaming’, Stanner’s lecture pointed out that ‘there is a secret river of blood running throughout Australian history’ since European settlement, shrouded by ‘the Great Australian silence’.
The erasure or silencing of one set of narratives by another is, of course, obvious here. But the point I want to explore is how, even after the Great Australian Silence is shattered, its technologies of erasure continue to permeate everyday forms of cultural expression. A short time after the publication and success of The Secret River, Grenville wrote an account of how she wrote it, entitled Searching for the Secret River (2011). In one episode, she recounts how, while working on the book, she met an Indigenous Australian novelist called Melissa Lucashenko at a dinner event in London for Australian writers. When Lucashenko asked her what she was working on, Grenville casually responded that she was working on a non-fiction book about her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, who had come to Australia as a convict and who ‘took up land on the Hawkesbury’ river:
‘What do you mean “took up”?’ she [Melissa] said. ‘He took.’
He took up land on the Hawkesbury. They were the words from the family story: a formula, unquestionable. I’d been repeating them for years.
Took up: you took up something that was lying around. You took up something that was on offer. You took up hobbies and sports.
Took had many more possibilities. You took something because it was there, like a coin on the ground. You took offence or flight or a bath. Or you took something away from someone else.
The words took up were standing in for some set of actions. The words weren’t the thing itself, they only pointed towards it … Took up — suddenly it felt like a trick. (Searching for the Secret River 28)
Both this episode and the conceptual metaphor of the secret river itself effectively illustrate how cultural expression rests on a dialectic of putting and being put ‘under erasure’.3 The former exemplifies how the language of euphemism bleaches or erases the bloody reality of colonisation. In turn, it necessitates not only the making visible and legible of that history and reality, but also the need to put the euphemisms themselves under erasure, so that occluded history cannot continue to be obscured and overwritten. Put simply, when talking about European settlement, the everyday expression ‘took up land’ needs to be put under erasure and replaced by ‘took land’.
The metaphor of the secret river, on the other hand, points to how the ideological contestation between competing historical, social, and cultural narratives can never, in the final instance, simply be about making room for alternative viewpoints and perspectives. In fact, this insistence on ‘viewpoint diversity’ is itself a euphemism recently coined by right-wing political groups as part of a strategy involving the appropriation of the axioms of liberalism for their own purposes. Under the guise of openness – that is, tolerance of diversity – there is a secret closure being enacted, the obscuring of this unspoken agenda. The contemporary trope of ‘viewpoint diversity’ is ultimately rooted in a traditional liberal emphasis on openness over closure (to which I shall return). However, its contemporary inscription is an alt-right code for the re-legitimation of scientific racism within the academy that has since spread out into popular discourse as a way of rehabilitating racism more generally (Titley loc 770–79).
In a structurally unequal society that is deeply marked, at every level and scale, by the historical imprint of that structural inequality on social discourses, the liberal belief that these narratives can simply be placed alongside each other for rational consideration and deliberation – as carrying equal weight and value within a ‘marketplace of ideas’ – is not tenable. Hegemonic narratives are hegemonic precisely because they have been marked, over the longue durée, as possessing greater value; they have been weighted by the social and political interests of dominant groups, often to the point where these narratives are not seen as narratives at all but simply facts of life and nature. This is achieved not only by overshadowing alternative narratives, but by overwriting them, by putting them under erasure. To borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988) about ‘unspeakable things, unspoken’, the reason the river of blood running through Australia’s history, for example, was secret is not only because it was ‘unspoken’ for generations. It is also because, for much of that time, it was ‘unspeakable’. This is why the Grenville family’s ‘formula’ about Wiseman ‘taking up’ land was ‘unquestionable’. Conversely, the narratives of subordinated groups, by virtue of having been marginalised and put under erasure, cannot carry the same weight and value as those of dominant groups, until the ideological contestation of those dominant narratives reaches the point where those dominant narratives are themselves put under erasure.
What I am arguing, therefore, is for the necessity of erasure in any cultural politics seeking to contribute to the restitution of social injustices. Anti-racism, for example, needs to put racism ‘under erasure’ and, indeed, the language of its practice acknowledges the necessity for closures on racism: anti-racist initiatives, for example, speak of ‘showing racism the red card’ or ‘kick[ing] it out’; everyday language of anti-racism often speaks of ‘stamping it out’, and so on. Each of these formulations acknowledges the need to expel racism from the field of play as a metaphor for its expulsion from the social field more generally. This is necessary if it is to be overcome or vanquished, even if these slogans do not spell this out explicitly. If racism cannot be expelled, then ipso facto it cannot be fully overcome, and the goal of anti-racist politics is annulled. Moreover, an underlying premise of racism itself – that it is a ‘natural’ and inevitable ‘fact of life’ – would then be inadvertently confirmed.
But if the erasure of racialised minority perspectives is the outcome of a racist hegemony, then how does one erase the very thing that produces erasure? This is a key challenge facing groups challenging social injustice. Antonio Gramsci took it up with particular urgency, given that his predicament was not a theoretical one, but rather forged in the heat of a political battle with fascism. His theorisation of ‘hegemony’ was an attempt both to account for the durability of a capitalist social order and to theorise the possibility of its overcoming. Of all the thinkers who have addressed this problem, he is perhaps the one who has most acutely understood that the strength of an hegemony is also, in fact, a potential weakness — it rests on a paradox. As I have written elsewhere, hegemony creates a
tissue of … common sense that is so taken for granted that it is imperceptible, so firmly embedded both everywhere and nowhere, [that it] is stronger than it appears and often able to withstand a battery of rational counter-arguments and an arsenal of counter-evidence. (Mondal, Racism 179)
At the same time, the impalpability and evanescence that is its source of durability is also what makes it vulnerable to contestation, because
although it successfully imposes limits on what is perceptible and thinkable, it doesn’t quite achieve the necessary degree of foreclosure to make something absolutely unthinkable. It is fragile and vulnerable and must be continually reinforced and restated, repeated in perpetuity. (Mondal, Racism 179)
So, the goal is to replace a racist hegemony with an anti-racist, even alter-racist one.4 However, it is here that a divergence opens up within anti-racism itself — between those who embrace the legitimacy of closure when it comes to racist practices, and those who argue that we need to put closures on racist discourse as well as racist practices for this to be effective. Broadly speaking, the former can be associated with liberal approaches to anti-racism. The latter can be aligned with radical, non-liberal, leftist movements (in fact, liberal approaches often tacitly accept closures on racist discourse, though they usually balk at facing up to the implications that I have tried to trace out in this essay and elsewhere). For my part, I am very clear about where I stand on this, and I go through the arguments at length in Racism and ‘Free Speech’. It is racism that creates race, not the other way round; racist discourse not only creates the conditions of possibility for racist practices, it also creates the very idea of ‘race’ on which a racialised social order rests, and within which racist practices take root and flourish. From this perspective, the very distinction between racist speech and racist action is a fallacy.
Because racialised narratives are hegemonic, anti-racisms that argue we should contest racism simply through speaking up and speaking out about it (through counter-speech) are bound to be ineffective. We should engage in counter-speech, of course we should; and it is vitally necessary to volubly contest racist hegemonies. But this alone is insufficient to overcome them. To ‘vanquish’ racism – to use one of the martial metaphors so common within liberal free speech theory – we need also to put racist discourse ‘under erasure’.
I want to return to Wendy Brown and a contemporary culture of ‘compulsory discursivity’. This culture has emerged out of, and accompanied, a culture in which closure is anathemised, a culture of denial about erasure that insists on openness and transparency, while secretly closing off closure as its necessary counterpart. This has been a long time in the making, since the early twentieth century at least. But it has reached its apogee now in the twenty-first century, aided and abetted by the emergence of digital social media that appears to give us ever more channels for unfiltered and unrestricted articulation of our expression (Mondal, Racism).
It is a culture that rests, as Brown notes, on a ‘modernist conceit that the truth makes us free’ (315), but it also rests on the idea that the truth will speak for itself. If everyone is allowed to speak, if all ideas are permissible, then the argument goes that it is best to leave it to the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’ to inevitably winnow out truth from falsehood. It is assumed that once the ‘truth’ is articulated, no rational person would abjure the truth for falsehood (Mondal, Racism 30–55). The difficulties inherent in this thinking are clearly apparent from the vantage point of our post-truth era, but the marketplace of ideas remains, nevertheless, the dominant and governing metaphor for almost all discussions of ‘free speech’ in contemporary society. Rooted, ultimately, in John Stuart Mill’s three interlocking arguments for complete ‘freedom of thought and discussion’, contemporary conceptualisations of ‘free speech’ are shaped by two sets of presuppositions. The first is that no idea should ever be ruled out, even one that is false, because it is always possible we might be wrong about its falsehood. I have called this the ‘trope of infinite and perpetual openness’ (Mondal, Racism).
The second is that judgement is at once necessary, unnecessary, and also antithetical to the infinite and perpetual openness of the marketplace of ideas. It is necessary in order to discern truth from falsehood; it is unnecessary because the truth speaks for itself and is obvious once it is articulated; and it is antithetical because judgement involves closure. To make a judgement is to put a spoke in the wheels of the infinitely and perpetually open circulation of ideas. It arrests it, saying ‘this is the truth’ so that must be false. But this then creates a paradox within the machinery of infinite and perpetual openness on which the ideological effec- tivity of liberal free speech theory rests: ‘judgment is required in order to suspend judgment on the very thing(s) [i.e. “truth” and “falsehood”] on which judgment is required’ (Mondal, Racism 36).
It is here that we encounter something like a return of the repressed in our contemporary culture of ‘free speech’ and ‘compulsory discursivity’. To insist on infinite and perpetual openness is to abjure closure of any kind. But that itself is a closure because it closes off the possibility of closure. As I have argued, this is not surprising because closure and erasure are not, in fact, the antithesis of openness and expression, but rather what give expression its very shape and form.
Contemporary discourse on ‘free speech’ is shot through with contradictions like this but, like all mythologies, its function is to rhetorically smooth them over so that we do not notice the work the myth does in making the status quo acceptable. The public sphere within which the marketplace of ideas is situated never was open to all; it never did allow all ideas to circulate; it never gave equal currency and weight to all ideas; it never allowed all kinds of people to articulate them. And it never will, because it never can. This market is not a neutral mechanism. It is deeply rigged. It is structurally unequal.
Moreover, this mythologisation of ‘free speech’ has enabled its weaponisation by political forces intent on retrenching structural inequalities by normalising the kinds of discourse – such as racism – that were responsible for those inequalities and exclusions in the first place. If all ideas, all discourses, are valid, then it follows that racism is as legitimate as the discourses that seek to overthrow it; so too, classism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. Since the 1980s, various right-wing political factions have grasped the opening, as it were, offered by ‘free speech’ to advance their causes to the point where now it has become acceptable to openly espouse and articulate ideas and beliefs that not so long ago were unspeakable, at least in public.
Lucy Connolly offers a good example. The wife of an elected Conservative Party councillor, Connolly published some highly incendiary and provocative social media messages during the UK’s anti-migrant riots in the summer of 2024, posts that clearly met the legal definition of incitement to racial hatred (PA Media).5 For this, she was jailed for thirty-one months. Since then, she has become a cause célèbre among rightwing movements, a posterwoman for how ‘free speech’ is under threat by ‘wokeness’ (Quinn). Her cause has been taken up by the Free Speech Union, Tommy Robinson, and Nigel Farage, who has raised her case at a Congressional hearing. It has been echoed and amplified by several senior figures in the Trump administration, as well as the wider right-wing movement in the United States. Not one of these groups and individuals has said so much as a word in protest at the proscription of Palestine Action, a discrepancy that vividly illustrates how ‘free speech’ has been utilised to delegitimise antiracist protections within law against the expression of incitements to racial hatred. In other words, the Free Speech Union, right-wing commentators (and, it must be noted, some liberals too) have effectively signalled that there should be no legal protection for racialised minorities from expression of racist speech, even when it is likely to cause imminent public disorder and threaten racially minoritised lives and livelihoods. This is effectively a call for a return to the racist normalcy of the post-war period, before the introduction of various legal protections for racialised minority communities, such as the 1986 Public Order Act.
Even moral censure of racism – for example, insisting it is unacceptable to say something racist – is characterised by very powerful forces within society as itself unacceptable, because it involves a judgement resting on an implicit closure: racist speech should not be allowed on moral grounds even if it is legally permissible. One particularly powerful example of this has been the delegitimisation of any attempt to call out anti-immigration protests as racist, even though they usually use racist tropes and arguments. To call out such racism is characterised as a dismissal of the ‘legitimate concerns’ of ‘ordinary people’, and a threat to their right to ‘free speech’ even though this does not actually prevent them from expressing their concerns. The tropes of infinite and perpetual openness and ‘viewpoint diversity’ thus become useful ways of insinuating the moral equivalence of racism and racial equality without saying so openly. And those who have weaponised ‘free speech’ are not the only ones who espouse this position: plenty of liberals appear quite happy to argue that the task of eliminating racism should be left to the mythical marketplace of ideas (Strossen; Malik; Cohen).
THE ETHICS OF ERASURE
The underlying problem is that a culture that believes in its own myth of ‘free speech’ as requiring infinite and perpetual openness must also infinitely and perpetually defer judgement. However, there is simultaneously no shortage of often sharp, ill-informed, inappropriate, or simply irrelevant judgements passed almost every second of every day in our contemporary mediascapes. This is the return of the repressed to which I referred earlier, and I shall return to this paradox in due course. The big problem here for anti-racists who acknowledge that racist discourse must be put under erasure is that the myth of ‘free speech’ can be mobilised against us to characterise us as ‘woke thought police’ and ‘totalitarians’. Notwithstanding the irony that this characterisation of social justice movements involves its own closures, nor the fact that all expression involves erasure of some kind, the key problem facing us is: how can we put racist discourse under erasure within such conditions of possibility?
While I have argued that we must do this if we are to successfully overcome racism, how we do it remains an open question. We need to think through the relationship between politics and ethics in depth, and the issue, in my view, rests not so much on the need to make judgements as on the kinds of judgements that we make — and, most importantly, how we make them.
At this point we confront a larger problem within the history of modernity, pertaining to the conditions of possibility for ethical practice itself. In her magisterial survey of the various forms that rules have taken within the ‘western tradition since antiquity’ – encompassing ‘laws, maxims, principles, guidelines, instructions, recipes, regulations, aphorisms, norms and algorithms, to name just a few’ – Lorraine Daston notes three structuring oppositions: between what she calls ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ rules; between specificity and generality; and between rigidity and flexibility (3).
The first of these distinctions – between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ rules – is, in many ways, the governing opposition in Daston’s analysis, and the one I am most interested in regarding the ethics of erasure. It should be noted, however, that it always overlaps with the others to the point where the distinctions between each set of oppositions are really only heuristic and analytical. A ‘thick’ rule, suggests Daston, is ‘flexible in application’ and ‘upholstered with examples, caveats, observations and exceptions. It is a rule that anticipates wide variations in circumstances and therefore requires nimble adaptation’ (3). The prime example Daston provides is the Rule of St Benedict. Herein, the behaviour and actions of the abbot of a monastery become a model for those within the monastic community to follow, but not necessarily imitate, in minute or exact detail. As Daston puts it, ‘[m]odels are to be emulated, not imitated … To follow such a rule involves understanding which aspects of the model are essential and which are merely accidental details’ (8). This, in turn, requires an exercise of judgement, which in turn rests on the acceptance of discretion as being part and parcel of the rule itself. ‘To be able to distinguish between cases that differ from one another in small but crucial details,’ writes Daston,
is the essence of … discretion, an ability that exceeds mere analytical acuity. Discretion draws additionally upon the wisdom of experience, which teaches which distinctions make a difference in practice, not just in principle. (37)
A ‘thin’ rule, on the other hand, is ‘rigidly applied’ and ‘[does] not invite the exercise of discretion’ because it is ‘seldom designed to deal with unusual or simply diverse cases’ (3). Algorithms are exemplary thin rules, and social media algorithms are only the most obvious example of the extent to which ‘thin’ rules now hold sway over large swathes of lived experience. Thin rules stop you from driving the wrong way down a one-way street; tell you where you can and cannot park; what you can and cannot pack as you go through airport security; whether or not you qualify for a loan; whether you should be kicked off social media; whether you qualify for welfare benefits, and so on. All these everyday examples offer little or no discretion in their application. They are the kinds of rules mocked by the television show Little Britain, in a sketch where a deadpan office clerk simply repeats the phrase ‘Computer says no’ to whatever question is asked by the customer. According to the logic of the thin rule, ‘[e]xercising discretion … stands opposed to following rules faithfully’ (39).
One of Daston’s main historical (as opposed to conceptual) arguments is that the pre-modern primacy of thick rules has given way to the dominance of thin rules in modernity, to the point where the very idea of the ‘rule’ is equated with thin rules: ‘The flexible rule became the flabby rule — or no rule at all’ (15). This is because thin rules ‘implicitly assume a predictable, stable world in which all possibilities can be foreseen’ (3), an argument resonating strongly with Foucault’s arguments that the epistemic regimes of modernity are governed by the axioms of measurement and classification. Modernity’s discursive practices begin with ‘thin’ rules (such as the creation of binary oppositions) that often, if not always, thicken because of the intractability of reality to any kind of reductive rationalisation.
Racism, in fact, is an exemplary case in point. Right from its inception in the eighteenth century, it was bound to the logic of classification and then, as it matured into the ‘scientific racism’ of the nineteenth century, this logic was overlaid with the logic of measurement. Linnaeus’ first edition of his Systems of Nature (1735) indicated four ‘varieties’ of humankind, spatially mapped onto the four known continents and indexed according to skin colour: European (white), American (reddish), Asian (tawny), and African (black). By the time he published the tenth edition in 1758, this simple classification had expanded into five whole pages, with notes and glossaries on each category. As the threat of miscegenation disrupting neat racial classifications increasingly preoccupied racial thinkers to the point of obsession, the idioms of quantification became embedded into racist discourse. This simultaneously entrenched and qualified racial categorisations, while perennially thickening the simple, ‘thin’ binary of Self/Other on which the whole edifice of racism rests (see Figure 1).
It is here that I see an opportunity for Daston’s arguments concerning thick and thin rules to be brought to bear on the ethics of erasure. I have argued elsewhere that our dominant ways of thinking about ‘free speech’ have flattened the variegated, jagged, and often contradictory realities of social communication by reducing social discourse to a unidimensional, homogenous, ‘flat’, and abstracted arena of exchange — metaphorically represented by an apparently neutral marketplace of ideas (Mondal, ‘Shape’). Social discourse, in this line of thinking, must be smooth and contiguous, and simply ‘free’ across any and all contexts. Which is to say that there is, in fact, no need for context or attention to specificity: what pertains to the seminar room must also pertain to political speech must also pertain to a social media post, and so on. This is an algorithmic formulation (if x = y then so too z, or a = b = c = d etc) that I would

					

					

					

					

					

					

					
FIGURE 1. FROMWB
STEVENSON, NARRATIVE					
OF TWENTY YEARS’		
RESIDENCE IN SOUTH					
AMERICA (1825). SOURCE:		
REPRODUCED FROM					
MARY LOUISE PRATT,		
IMPERIAL EYES: TRAVEL					
WRITING AND		
TRANSCULTURATION					
(ROUTLEDGE, 1992),		
P. 152.				

argue is ultimately rooted in Mill’s ‘one very simple principle’ about liberty.
A principle is not in itself a thin rule (although, as Daston notes, principles have always sat within the conceptual set of ‘rules’ more generally). Nevertheless, it is clear from the ways in which ‘free speech’ controversies are now conducted that the various antagonists rest their arguments on a ‘principle’ as if it were a thin rule. There are, in the realm of cultural practice, no rules thinner than such arguments of principle: on the one hand, the principle of ‘free speech’ means nothing should be unsayable; on the other, the principle that racism is wrong means that all forms of racist expression are equally culpable.
Arguments thinned out like this tend towards jud- gementalism. You are either a ‘woke totalitarian censor’ or an ‘incorrigible racist’; you are ‘good’ or you are ‘bad’ depending on perspective. Underlying this judgementalism is an essentialism in which your speech is an inevitable expression of your own flawed, failing character rather than (among many other things) the articulation of a social structure. Hence the paradox of a judgemental culture in which judgement needs to be deferred.
What might happen if we manage to exit this language game? If we refused to be drawn into simple judgements based on reductive principles and thin assessments? If, instead, we were to open ourselves to the irreducible singularity of each encounter with the ever-shifting relationship between expression and erasure? If we were to thicken that encounter with the knowledge that there is no algorithm here that we can draw upon to find a neat, simple solution? This is what an ethics of erasure calls for: a robust critical attention to specificity and context, without guarantees, guided but not rigidly determined by our moral principles and values. A moral criticism that refrains from moralism, that refuses to reduce ethical and political practice to the easy matter of sticking to abstract principles. Such an ethics is compelled to rehabilitate judgement and discretion from the margins to which they have been relegated, to reverse ‘the demotion of judgment from exercise in critical reason to indulgence in darkling subjectivity’ (Daston 15).
This is what I believe the American poet Claudia Rankine and her co-editor Beth Loffreda call for in their introduction to The Racial Imaginary (2015) when – addressing contemporary controversies over cultural appropriation, and the representation of racia- lised minority experience by authors racialised as White – they pose a series of searching questions seeking to bypass the limiting language game of ‘rights’. When some writers – Lionel Shriver is perhaps the most high profile of these – claim to have the ‘right’ to imagine any and all experiences regardless of ‘race’, they are invoking a thin principle in a way that is similar to those who simply invoke the right to ‘free speech’, as if that were the beginning and the end of the matter. Rankine and Loffreda, on the other hand, move beyond such rights talk to thicken the encounter between a writer’s imagination and ‘race’:
Are we saying Asian writers can’t write Latino characters?
That white writers can’t write black characters? That no one can write from a different racial other’s point of view? We’re saying we’d like to change the terms of that conversation, to think about creativity and the imagination without employing the language of rights and the sometimes concealing terms of craft. To ask some first-principle questions instead. So not: can I write from another’s point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how. What is the charisma of what I feel most estranged from, and why might I wish to enter and inhabit it? (Rankine et al 17–18)
While, on the face of it, Rankine and Loffreda are talking about an ethics of representation and, therefore, expression, my argument throughout this essay has been that any such ethics is also-always an ethics of erasure — an ethics of not only what can be said but also what cannot. This is what I take them as referring to when stating,
We acknowledge that every act of imaginative sympathy inevitably has limits. Perhaps a way to expand those limits is not only to write from the perspective of a racial other but instead to inhabit, as intensely as possible, the moment in which the imagination’s sympathy encounters its limit. (Rankine et al 17)
The concept of erasure is perhaps particularly appropriate here as it can be mobilised as a critical metaphor capturing the varying intensities of any such ethical and political practice. In deconstruction, putting something ‘under erasure’ involves acknowledging the doubleness of a critical gesture that is compelled to use the very concept that it puts into question. The political implications of this doubleness have long been apparent to anti-racists, for example, who must continue to use the concept of ‘race’ within their everyday political practice even as they seek to put ‘race’ under erasure. This is because the goal of anti-racism is to make the concept of ‘race’ meaningless, without resorting to evasive gestures (such as invoking ‘colour-blindness’) that keep the concept and its racist apparatus very much intact, while apparently transcending it. In drawing on the concept of erasure as developed within deconstruction, I acknowledge my debt to the value of recognising the need to wrestle with this difficult doubleness. However, I also want to extend the political reach of the metaphor by drawing on physical acts of erasure, such as ‘rubbing out’ a text using an eraser. This ‘rubbing out’ can vary from light to heavy, and the trace of what is erased can remain more or less legible, or rendered totally imperceptible. Therefore, to put racist discourse ‘under erasure’ might mean, for example, seeking to put it under total erasure, so that it becomes unspeakable. While this may, in practice, be unlikely, some kinds of racist language demand that kind of intense erasure. The criminalisation of direct incitements to violence against racialised groups and individuals would be one such instance. In other cases, it might mean partial erasure — a dimming of racism’s intensity. This might involve ensuring that there are appropriate consequences for the use of racist language, the severity of which would depend on the nature of the language used and its context. These situations can sometimes be relatively clear-cut, sometimes complex and messy. On the one hand, egregious use of racist language to verbally abuse racialised others can lead swiftly to dismissal, boycotts, or what has become known as ‘cancellation’. While the political right has recently deployed ‘cancel culture’ as a rhetorical trope to delegitimise such erasures in the name of ‘free speech’, a moment’s reflection exposes this as an attempt to legitimise the idea that using racist language should bear no consequences, which is a useful step towards its normalisation. On the other hand, some situations can involve some rather convoluted and tortuous posturing and toing and froing, and a frustrating lack of resolution for all parties. This was certainly the case with the controversy over the presence of racial stereotypes in Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Hinsliff; Mondal, Racism 97–99).
In some other cases, it might involve the expression of counter-speech (such as the articulation of a rebuttal or counter-argument), a calling out (protests or other challenging gestures), or what Rae Langton has called ‘blocking’. ‘Blocking’ is, for Langton, a particular kind of calling out. She suggests that because
[s]peech acts can build unjust norms and authority patterns, helped along by hearers who do not block them, [a] hearer who blocks what is presupposed, also blocks the speech act to which the presupposition contributes … The success of a speech act can depend on its presuppositions, and on hearers accommodating those presuppositions. That is why blocking a presupposition can make the speech act fail. Blocking can disable, rather than refute, evil speech. It can make speech misfire, to use Austin’s label for a speech act gone wrong. It offers a way of ‘undoing’ things with words. (Langton 145)
Blocking might involve what she calls ‘explicitation’ (Langton 154). The blocker spells out the ‘presuppositions’ lying behind a racist speech act, and in so doing challenges it,
[w]hen the hearer blocks with explicitation, forcing the speaker’s cards onto the table, the back-door speech acts fail, at least as back-door speech acts. What was implicit is brought out into the open, where it has to be treated, and defended, as an explicit assertion. (Langton 154)
Langton gives the example of a bystander who makes explicit the discriminatory presuppositions behind an Aussie Rules football supporter abusing a player by sarcastically calling him ‘you great girl’. ‘What’s wrong with being a girl?’ is the explicitation that brings the abuser’s sexist presuppositions out into the open (154). An even more pertinent example is her use of Rosa Parks —
[she] acted heroically, but she did not say ‘No, that sign is a lie!’ She did not use counter-speech of the sort imagined by advocates of the ‘more speech’ doctrine. She did not treat a true rule as a false assertion, by contradicting it. Instead, she challenged the authority the rule presupposed, in her actions, and her words, when she said, ‘I don’t think I should have to stand up,’ to the arresting officer.6 (150)
Putting racism under erasure often involves or requires a combination of these things over time. For instance, the comedian Andrew Lawrence was called out over some social media posts that racially abused three black players in the England football team during the European Championship final in 2021. He then doubled down and issued several further racially abusive posts. This led to his agent dropping him (Lockyer). Putting racism under erasure could even involve the re-inscription of racist discourse itself within a critical framework, or through irony, or as a mobilisation of satire, and so on. What an ethics of erasure must require, however – and here I must be open about the closure – is a disavowal of any rigid application of a thin rule that involves no discernment, no discretion, and no judgement.
What I have tried to do in this essay is to open up some space to think about cultural politics otherwise — a space in which we can think differently about what is going on and what is at stake when cultural expression occurs, and when disputes arise about it. We have to begin with being open about the role of erasure and closure in shaping expression. We have to acknowledge that an infinitely open culture is a logical and experiential impossibility, that an orientation towards openness can – and, indeed, must – be accompanied by an acknowledgment that closures and erasures are necessary. So, we must think about which closures are necessary and why, and we must open ourselves to the charismatic difficulty of each situation in its irreducible singularity.
There is an open invitation here to critical vigilance, as well as constant self-reflection on what it is we value and why, because infinite and perpetual openness – openness without closure – is not only impossible, but also involves a relativism that is leading us into a moral and political void. I am reminded here of a line from a song by the American folk rock singer, John Mellencamp, ‘You’ve got to stand for somethin’, or you’re gonna fall for anything.’ The wisdom is homespun, no doubt, but true nonetheless. It feels like we are on the brink of a precipice. Are we going to allow ourselves to fall in, or can we do what it takes to pull ourselves back?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This essay is based on the keynote plenary lecture that I delivered at the English: Shared Futures conference in York, 3–5 July 2025. I would like to thank the organisers of English: Shared Futures for inviting me to give this lecture, thereby prompting me to sharpen my thoughts on what it means to pursue an anti-racist cultural politics in our contemporary moment.
NOTES
[1]		Genetic criticism is a form of literary criticism that traces and accounts for the process of composition, redrafting, editing, and so on that leads up to the publishing of a text and, for some genetic critics, any process that materially affects the text even after publication. In the words of Dirk van Hulle, its focus is on the ‘literary alluvium — notes, drafts, marginalia’ that accompanies the ‘flux’ of writing and literary creativity.
[2]		Perhaps the clearest formulation of this is in Isaiah Berlin’s famous Four Essays on Liberty: ‘The extent of a man’s negative liberty is … a function of what doors and how many are open to him, upon what prospects they open; and how open they are’ conversely, the ‘absence of such freedom is due to the closing of such doors’ (xlviii, xl).
[3]		The term ‘under erasure’ comes from deconstruction, referring to a concept which has been put into question by deconstructive reading, and often represented using textual strikethroughs a bit like the quoted text from McWatt in this essay. I have adapted the term to draw out its wider cultural and political significance, and I elaborate my usage in this essay’s concluding stages.
[4]		See Ghassan Hage. His Alter-Politics speaks of the need to ‘weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics)’ (Hage 1). As I read it, the anti-racist goal of replacing a racist hegemony must involve a simultaneous alter- racism if the dialectics of race are to be overcome.
[5]		Connolly posted, ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me a racist, so be it.’ In fact, at least one hotel was, indeed, set alight.
[6]		It should be noted that there are limits to ‘blocking’ as there are to all these forms of anti-racist action, limits determined by the conditions of possibility pertaining to the context, both specific and general, in which they are enacted. See Mondal, Racism 166fn21.
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