The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Pritha Prasad, University of Kansas

 

At the end of April this year—in fact, the very same day a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) encampment had formed on campus during continuing Israeli military attacks upon Gaza and West Bank universities, hospitals, mosques, and neighborhoods —faculty learned that after nearly 3 years of campaigning, the official vote had finally passed for us to unionize. The push for the union had been initially motivated by the extreme conditions of precarity faced by faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic and the financial crisis for higher education that soon followed. In early 2021, for example, our state’s Board of Regents had passed a policy to allow public universities in the state to opt in to effectively suspend tenure protections (Pettit, 2021). My university did not at first opt out of this policy. This decision was rightly perceived by many to be a passive threat to departments and units to remain committed to financial downsizing. But in the broader context of 2020-2021 Black Lives Matter protests, anti-Asian violences, and, in May 2021, violent attacks by Israeli forces in response to protests over the forced expulsion of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the implications felt much more dire at the time the union drive began: the Board of Regents policy was not only a threat to academic freedom, but also an institutional response to anyone who might critique or resist US state, geopolitical, and/or imperialist interests.

I always supported the union drive in principle, but the campaign also began when I was in my second year on the tenure track as then the only assistant professor in the Department of English. This condition of hypervisibility in combination with the lingering threat of the new Board of Regents policy and my own positionality as one of a few BIPOC faculty members in my department from the Global South made me feel deeply ambivalent about articulating public support or signing my name anywhere. And given the nature of my research in critical university studies and critical race and ethnic studies in a state seeking to undermine and diminish higher education and diversity programming, I rightly feared the retaliation I had seen so many BIPOC faculty experience at my university and others. So, over the last couple years, when union organizers—mostly senior, tenured white men—brazenly and repeatedly showed up to my campus office hours unannounced to request I sign their petitions, I always politely and respectfully declined, stating that while I supported the union, I’d prefer to keep my name off any documents. Each time, I was questioned and implicitly shamed for my reasoning. Don’t you want the university to be a better and safer place for people who do research like you do? Isn’t it the case that supporting our faculty’s activism efforts also helps ensure the right to protest and organize for all? Other untenured faculty of color have signed, so why won’t you? Eventually, things escalated, and I started receiving phone calls in the evenings from organizers, and then, to my shock, unexpected visits to my home by senior faculty I had never met before. Three years later, worn out from continually defending my decision not to sign my name anywhere, I signed just to make it stop.

I am well aware of many academics’ unwillingness to recognize the dissonance between radical theory and the actual material complexities of multiply marginalized peoples’ everyday lives. But when I think back on my experience with union organizers in the broader context of Palestinian liberation, I remain struck by how rhetorics of comparison had been weaponized by faculty organizers to demand support for their cause, especially from me. Despite the fact that faculty organizing for a union is indeed a very different thing from, for example, Black Lives Matter protests or—perhaps more relevant to the subject matter of this essay—working in coalition with decolonial movements and politics, these differences had been coolly and abstractly collapsed by organizers to garner support throughout the union drive to establish what I have elsewhere referred to as idealized coalitions: performative, dematerialized engagements with radical politics and movements that are premised upon an “idealized (and usually false) assumption of collective or shared politics that is often neither reciprocal nor consensual” (Prasad, 2021, para. 8). Fast forward to April 2024 and this dissonance came even more sharply into focus the very day the union vote passed: At the exact same time I could literally hear SJP protesters—largely Palestinian, Arab, Indigenous, Black, and South Asian students—marching on campus during their own finals week to oppose H.R. 8034,[1] my phone was blowing up with mass celebratory texts from union representatives about the happy passage of the union vote and upcoming parties and rallies on campus in the coming days to urge administrators to begin bargaining on the first contract. SJP, meanwhile, continued to post and publicly circulate videos and pictures of police threatening and arresting students, stealing their food and water, and tearing down their encampment. But no statements of support, solidarity, or even acknowledgement ever came from the faculty union. Nothing about SJP protests, administrators’ endorsement of the excessive police presence on campus, or protecting students’ right to protest peacefully and safely.

Again alarmed by the profound contradiction between the union’s promises to “protect academic voice during tumultuous times on campus and higher education writ large” (Lopez, 2024, para. 4) and its failure to do that very thing in practice, I decided to send a text to a union faculty representative asking if the union had any plans to publicly defend “our students’ (and staff/faculty’s) right to protest safely.” Over a day later, just as I had seen on Instagram that SJP had decided to end the encampment due to dwindling support, I received a response: "Pritha, though the encampment ended yesterday, and, as far as I know, without incident, the issue you raise will be important for us to think over in our next phase, as we begin to accumulate experience working as a union. I hope you’re considering participating in our bargaining council, or on one of our committees."[2] I wondered about the meaning of “without incident.” What counts as an “incident” worth addressing? Does an “incident” need to happen for the union to act? To what level must something (or someone, or some group of people) rise before there is “incident” enough? Through this politics of deferral—i.e., this issue is one to “think over in our next phase,” not this one—I clocked yet another opportunistic and deeply ironic politics of comparison: The “issue I raise[d],” though not apparently a matter of “incident” now or today, had been conveniently folded into the futurity of the union’s campaign narrative. Under this logic, bargaining a union contract was presented as an act parallel to perhaps protecting BIPOC students from institutionally endorsed violence and opposing settler-colonialism in some abstract, imagined future, even while this work was forgone in the actual, lived present. When would the work of protecting “academic voice during tumultuous times on campus and higher education writ large” actually begin?

I open with this example not to critique my faculty union specifically, but rather to question the too-often conditional and, at times, contradictory nature of comparison, particularly when weaponized in academia and higher education to exceptionalize racialized, carceral, and settler/colonial forms of power. This question is particularly pressing now, a time when we have seen a critical resurfacing of such rhetorics as Israel’s violent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has intensified on an international scale. In a recent Inside Higher Ed editorial, for instance, philosopher Moti Mizrahi (2024) condemns pro-Palestine student protesters for being ignorant of “historical and philosophical context” in shouting “by any means necessary” and “from the river to the sea” (para. 1). However, at the same time that Mizrahi critiques the decontextualization of these statements in relation to Israel and Palestine, he also supports his argument using similarly decontextualized, ahistoricized examples (by his own logic). He invokes, among many others, examples like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to point to the “morally superior” position of nonviolence “in the pursuit of justice” (Mizrahi, 2024, para. 7) while valorizing nonspecific, universalized attributes like “courageous[ness],” “redemption,” “reconciliation,” and “faith” (Mizrahi, 2024, para. 8) as possible entry points for educators to “step in and educate [students] about the current war and broader conflict in the region” (Mizrahi, 2024, para. 9). These comparisons do not pivot upon a critical awareness of the links between anti-Blackness in the US, the British occupation of India, and Israel-Palestine that might justify the comparative deployment of Gandhi, King, and Israel-Palestine, but are instead recalled to evoke abstract, individualized narratives of good vs. bad moralisms.

Similarly, some pro-Israel academics have argued that there are limits to reading Israel and Palestine’s history through a US-centric framework of decoloniality, even while—in the same breath—deploying a distinctly US-centric politics of comparison to demonize Palestine. Author Simon Sebag Montefiore (2023) writes in an op-ed for The Atlantic, for example, that “the decolonization narrative” is “as dangerous as it is false” (para. 3) if deployed in the specific context of Israel and Palestine. Critiques of Israel’s “settler-colonialism,” Montefiore argues, are overdetermined by Western logics of race and antiracism and thus overlook what he believes are the unique and exceptional features of Israel and Palestine’s respective histories of “ethnic violence on both sides” (Montefiore, 2023, para. 23). Ironically, though, in calling for greater analytical, historical, and cultural specificity in analyses of Israel-Palestine, Montefiore himself hastily deploys common US, Western-originating tropes and Islamophobic ideologies as comparative metrics to emphasize Palestine’s apparent cultural backwardness, pointing, in part, to Hamas’s banning of same-sex relationships and its repression of women. Such logics constitute a form of “pinkwashing” common in the US and Canada whereby the LGBTQ and even women’s rights record of Israel functions as an explicit and implicit form of propaganda to obscure or legitimate its occupation of Palestine (Puar, 2017, p. 96). These comparative, trans/national discourses, Jasbir K. Puar (2017) points out, reinscribe “neo-orientalist fears” of Palestinians as “sexually repressed terrorists” to emphasize the “civilizational superiority” of Israel (p. 96) while at the same time insidiously suggesting that even sexually marginalized Palestinian subjects (ought to) support Israel for their own good and humanity.

As the examples of Mizrahi and Montefiore demonstrate, politics of comparison in the specific context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine too often get deployed in ways that are selective, conditional, and myopic, even as they (paradoxically) seem to position themselves against such frames. Indeed, US-based academics and writers may be quick to point out how the phrase, “from the river to the sea,” can be read as a pro-Hamas invocation of violence against Israel, though these same critiques typically don’t mention the ways Israeli politicians and military officials, as well as the right-wing Israeli Likud Party, have also called to violently extend and expand Israel’s control “from the river to the sea” (Kelley, 2019, p. 78). How, then, can we make space for a radical politics of comparison, one that understands decoloniality and anti-imperialism as the transnational, cross-historical projects they are and must be, in the face of such weaponizations?

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In his 2018 essay “blackpalestinian breath,” Fred Moten writes that “settler colonialism is, in each and every case, a state operation, but the more fucked up—and therefore better—way to put this . . . is that in each and every case, the state is a settler colonial operation” (Moten, 2018, para. 1). From this perspective, the modern state and its formation through settler-colonialism’s violent incursion upon “Africa as a field of indigeneity,” unavoidably brings Indigeneity and Blackness into “irreducible” transnational, transoceanic “entanglement” (Moten, 2018, para. 2). He thus asks: What would it mean to exhaust and refuse “state solution[s]” (as in the United States or the State of Israel) towards making Black and Palestinian lives, a “solidarity that will have never been wholly voluntary,” visible (Moten, 2018, para. 2)? Maybe, he writes, we should look to articulate “another naming, against the grain of nominalized individuation and the state and stasis for which such naming inadvertently settles” (Moten, 2018, para. 4).

I invoke Moten here to imagine a different kind of comparative politics than the individualized “state solution” logics that continue to profoundly constrain decolonial analyses of Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine. My investment in comparative analysis stems from my longstanding political and epistemological investment in women of color feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer of color critique—overlapping, though also distinct, transnationally-informed movements that uniquely enable us to interrogate the ways empire and coloniality are informed not only by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, but also how decolonial politics might be articulated from multiple locations and points of entry. In their foundational work, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011), for example, Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson argue that because the colonial imaginary is “fundamentally comparative” in that its legibility requires situating “Western civilization” in relation to what is understood as “backward, primitive, and eradicable” (p. 7), decolonial frameworks like women of color feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer of color critique, too, must operate comparatively. These comparative methods, however, function heterotopically in refusing “to maintain that objects of comparison are static, unchanging, and empirically observable” (Hong and Ferguson, 2011, p. 9). As such, comparison from this perspective is fundamentally organized around difference versus similarity. Women of color feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer of color critique, then, do not erase differentials of power, value, location, or history, but rather they “highlight such differentials and attempt to do the vexed work of forging a coalitional politics through these differences” (Hong and Ferguson, 2011, p. 9).

Such comparative methods can also mean working across and through geographic locations, histories, and identities to underscore how neo/settler/colonialism, global capitalism, and transnational militarization might enable us to envision how seemingly disparate decolonial struggles critically inform each other across geographic spaces, histories, and identities. While recognizing colonialism does not manifest in the same ways in all occupied territories, Steven Salaita (2016), for instance, underscores the necessity of an “inter/national” approach to decoloniality in the context of Israel and Palestine specifically. “Inter/nationalism”—unlike ‘internationalism,” which connotes an uncritical “cosmopolitan modernity”—instead “encourages and assesses the play of decolonial narratives across cultures and colonial borders” (p. xv). Such an approach is necessary, Salaita notes, because the emergence of Zionism in Europe in the late 19^th century “evoked a dialectic with the project of American settlement that remains today in the close relationship between the United States and Israel, apparent in military aid, security cooperation, and foreign policy” (Salaita, 2016, p. 7). These relationships are further bolstered by “particular articulations of belonging that codify national identity to the mythologies of colonial domination and military conquest” (Salaita, 2016, p. 8). Decolonial struggles against Israel’s occupation of Palestine, then, are necessarily linked to Indigenous struggles for liberation and self-determination across the world, especially in the US and Americas.[3]

From this perspective, we might read suggestions from Montefiore and many others that the US-based “decolonization narrative” is “false” in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine as more than just a disavowal of transnational articulations of imperialist power. These perspectives also perniciously assert epistemic authority over Palestinian liberation movements themselves and their own longstanding, intentional efforts to engage comparatively with US based antiracist, decolonial, and anti-imperialist movements from the 1960s onwards (Kelley, 2019, p. 78). As a more contemporary example, Puar points to the “Ferguson to Gaza” movement whereby organizers began tracing the material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the militarization of police in Ferguson, MO during the 2014-2015 Ferguson Uprising, and the Israeli state’s training of US law enforcement. Palestinian activists, too, have explicitly articulated these links. We might note, for instance, how Palestinian activists used social media during the Ferguson uprising to provide advice to Black Lives Matter organizers on how to resist the effects of tear gas (Davis, 2016; Puar, 2017; Ransby, 2018). Palestinian activists have also recently organized Freedom Rides, identifying themselves as “Palestinian Freedom Riders” in reference to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s during the US Civil Rights Movement (Davis, 2016, p. 114).

Furthermore, Palestinians have also increasingly begun to use the language of Indigeneity to make visible their calls for self-determination and liberation (Salaita, 2016, p. 3). Among many examples, we might note Palestinian anthropologist Sa’ed Adel Atshan’s explicit identification of the “shared history” between Palestinians and “Indigenous peoples who have [also] faced ethnic cleansing by European colonists” (qtd. in Salaita, 2016, p. 3), a move that positions Palestinian dispossession “in a specific framework of colonial history rather than as an exceptional set of events brought forth by ahistorical circumstances” (Salaita, 2016, p. 3). As Nadine Naber adds (2016), we also cannot ignore the ways Israeli strategies of containment and occupation so closely mirror those in the Americas: namely, the destruction of land, communities, and sacred spaces coupled with blocked access to food, hospitals, and other resources (p. 75). These parallels open up radical “comparative possibilities” in transnational decolonial struggles (Salaita, 2016, p. 3) as well as “shared histories for movement-building” across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Global South writ large (Naber, 2016, p. 77). They do not, as Robin D. G. Kelley (2019) would say, reinscribe an uncritical, presentist, or decontextualized “politics of analogy or identity,” but rather “a vision of worldmaking” based in a long history of transnational solidarity and parallel exchange from the 1960s onwards between and among Palestinian liberation movements, anti-imperialist and decolonial movements in the Americas, US-based Arab student movements, and Black struggles in the US, Africa, and throughout the diaspora (p. 78).[4]

Many decolonial perspectives originating from Palestine are also critically aware of how Eurocentric discourses of race, gender, and sexuality have worked to naturalize Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Naber (2016), for instance, points to the ways Israeli massacres of Palestinian peoples historically have been distinctly gendered and sexualized, often accompanied by “sexual assault, particularly of pregnant women, as a symbolic way of uprooting the child from the mother, or the Palestinian from the land” (p. 75). Additionally, Palestinian queer activisms remain “deeply attuned to the spatial triumvirate” of colonization, apartheid, and occupation that informs “the quotidian movements of Palestinians both inside and on the side of Israel” (Puar, 2017, p. 118). Movements like Palestinian Queers for BDS, in fact, have come to critically regard anti-occupation activism as queer activism (Puar, 2017, p. 118). Positioning queer and feminist liberation as decolonial projects and decoloniality as a shared, transnational endeavor captures the comparative impulse central to women of color feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer of color critique by imagining “models for coalition between two [or more] divergent formations” (Hong, 2011, p. xvi)—what Angela Y. Davis calls “unpredictable or unlikely coalitions” (qtd. in Lowe and Davis, 1997, p. 322)—that embrace contradiction and contestation “without occluding important differences” (Hong, 2011, p. xvi).

Against the current backdrop of settler/colonialism, transnational militarization, and global capitalism, then, single-axis forms of organizing and analysis that center on disparate nation-states are untenable because of the ways nation-states themselves make these “singular identifications” and binarized narratives of oppressor vs. oppressed uniquely impossible (Hong, 2011, p. xvi). That is, while the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the US and Americas are not literally the same as Israel’s displacement of indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the ongoing militarized, economic, and political ties between the US and Israel critically implicate the US and its many economic, political, cultural, and even educational institutions in the occupation of Palestine. As such, comparative analysis across national contexts—perhaps what Montefiore demonizes as the US-based “decolonization narrative”—is not just possible, but deeply necessary. Importantly, these frameworks also unsettle fixed, absolute notions of “oppressor” and “oppressed,” recognizing how temporal, spatial, geographic, and historical specificities can, in some moments and contexts, implicate even historically oppressed and colonized groups in colonial, white supremacist, and imperialist violences.

Thus, to recognize and address the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians as a result of the massive historical and material disparities between Israel and Palestine[5] is not to deny the very real and ongoing global pervasiveness of anti-Semitism (as is commonly suggested by popular media, public intellectuals, and US and Israeli politicians).[6] Instead, a comparative framework of racialization, coloniality, and empire would question how and why the threat of anti-Semitism has been evoked, particularly in the US, to silence and delegitimize critiques of Israel as a nation-state enacting genocide upon Palestinian peoples. What forces of transnational, comparative racialization and coloniality are at play, and which histories and global disparities are erased and/or remade, when single-axis, binarized narratives lead us to believe that advocating for the liberation of one group amounts to literal violence against another? How do US-based minority nationalisms—like those deployed by homonational, mainstream LGBTQ movements in the US and Israel to justify and naturalize the genocide and dispossession of Palestinians—not only critically inhibit coalitional, transnational queer liberation movements, but also prevent us from imagining how queer liberation itself could be a decolonial project, or how decolonization might center queer liberation? And finally, who really stands to benefit from a politics of comparison that reinscribes colonial binarisms and ahistorical, dematerialized equivalencies to actively discourage us from forging, as Third World feminist scholar Neferti X. M. Tadiar (2012) writes, “new relations” beyond the “inherited forms of social belonging to which we might have become tethered” (para. 4)?

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In her essay, “The Compass of Mourning” (2023), Judith Butler asks whether “we can mourn, without qualification, for the lives lost in Israel as well as those lost in Gaza” (para. 11). Critical of Butler’s call for a “both/and” framework for making visible the “equal grievability of lives,” however, Palestinian scholar Devin Atallah responds (2023): “Yes, we can mourn the Israeli lives lost in the Hamas raid. But as Palestinians, we do not have access to grieve our beloveds killed by Israeli settler-colonial and genocidal aggression” (para. 4). He goes on:

We know deep in our bodies that to grieve we must have access to the fluidity of time stolen from us along with our land . . . Colonizers' bodies have these privileges. Yet we, the colonized, still cannot pick up our body parts scattered across spaces and times. From this moment in Gaza City to forty years ago in Sabra and Shatila; from a few months ago in Jenin to twenty years ago in Bethlehem; from two years ago in Sheikh Jarrah to one year ago in Nablus; from nine years ago in Khan Younis to seventy-five years ago in Deir Yassin; and on, and on, and on. This is why, we, the colonized, cannot grieve our dead. We are obligated to steal our present to fight for our future. (Atallah, 2023, para. 8)

The theft of time to which Atallah refers is a critical element of what has been termed “sophicide” by Palestinian scholars and activists. Sophicide refers to the Zionist regime’s “deliberate annihilation of Indigenous knowledge traditions inspired by the land itself, as well as the carriers of that knowledge” (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2024, para. 1). Sophicide, the Palestinian Feminist Collective argues, also includes the Palestinian concept of “scholasticide,” which is “the physical destruction of centers of knowledge, educational resources, infrastructures, and archives, as well as the silencing, censorship, and repression of Palestinian history, epistemology, scholarship, and subjectivity” that spans beyond Palestine and into US and Canadian education centers” (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2024, para. 3). That is, as Atallah and the Collective point out, the theft, destruction, and impossibility of Palestinian life, grief, land, and time is intrinsically linked to the transnational silencing of Palestinian knowledge and world-making. Silence not only gives critical force to a kind of coloniality that pervades our educational, cultural, and political institutions, but it also renders certain bodies, spaces, and peoples systemically and historically unknowable, ungrievable. Though I raise this notion in the specific context of Palestine, it is not a new practice for colonialism, nor is it particularly new knowledge for decolonial thinkers (Trouillot,1995; Mignolo, 2011; Kauanui, 2018; Maira, 2018).

How, then, do we reconcile the deep silence, even from usually like-minded “decolonial” scholars, on the topic of Palestine? Rhetoric and composition studies, a field whose history and legacy has built critically through and from the political momentum of antiracist movements and histories (Smitherman, 2003; Kynard, 2013; Sano-Franchini et al., 2017), has rarely ever missed a beat when it comes to authoring and circulating (often performative) position statements and rhetorics to publicly reassert and manage its image as a social justice-oriented discipline. Special issues in which I’ve published consider the meanings of coalition and solidarity;[7] CCCC establishes countless decolonial and antiracist task forces and committees;[8] featured speakers and conference CFPs stress the ongoing need for social justice in our discipline, often specifically even authoring and delivering Indigenous land acknowledgements. Yet, despite CCCC’s carefully crafted public image as an equity-driven organization, its representatives have largely sidestepped the issue of Israel’s genocide and occupation of Palestine, not only by largely disregarding pro-Palestine collective FourCs DoBetter’s recent calls for public statements in support of Palestinian liberation, but also by ignoring FourCs DoBetter’s recent protest of the 2024 CCCC convention’s opening session, which ironically itself centered broadly on antiracism and social justice (Banville, 2024).

Indeed, as FourCs DoBetter has pointed out, CCCC’s expressions of support towards antiracist, anti-imperialist, and decolonial movements have been deeply and uniquely uneven (“Protesting CCCC’s Silence,” 2024). In April 2023, for example, the 2023 CCCC Executive Committee drafted a public statement universally condemning Russia’s “coordinated attacks on the innocent . . . aimed to demoralize Ukraine’s future,” including “strikes on medical and mental healthcare facilities” like “children’s hospitals, cancer centers, ambulances, healthcare workers, and patients” (Grayson et al., 2023, para. 8). However, in November 2023, when responding in part to Israel’s deployment of strikingly similar forms of genocidal violence against Palestine, members of the NCTE “Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English” independently authored a “Statement on Palestinian Genocide” calling English and Language Arts teachers to “elevate and humanize Palestinian narratives for students” and teach students “critical media literacy” (para. 2) in support of “Palestinian’s right to self-determination and justice” (CARBTE, 2023, para. 3). This statement, though, was immediately rescinded by NCTE leadership as being both “unauthorized” and too supportive of only “one side of the conflict” surrounding “the war in Israel and Palestine” (Fránquiz et al., 2023, para. 1) despite the fact that the “Statement on Palestinian Genocide” at no point justifies or calls for any violence done to Israel. Again, like in so many other examples I’ve discussed in this essay, the mere recognition of Palestinian humanity and self-determination has been read as a form of erasure, misrepresentation (Fránquiz et al., 2023), or violence towards (presumably) “the other side” such that “the case for Palestinian rights” becomes contingent upon “the denial of Jewish self-determination” (Hill and Plitnick, 2021, 16).

Against this backdrop, it becomes difficult to imagine how “the conflict” in Israel and Palestine could truly be so exceptional when the militarized, political, economic, and even representational disparities between them is so resoundingly palpable.[9] What’s more, the easy dialectic whereby articulating support for Palestine directly amounts to the denial of Jewish self-determination also leaves little room for a deeper historicizing of how Islamophobia, too, has been exceptionalized in the Global North’s post-9/11 register. Indeed, as Puar rightly notes in an essay narrating her own experiences being viciously attacked, targeted, and harassed as a pro-Palestine academic, Islamophobic expression on college campuses and beyond not only “rarely causes concern,” but is also often systemically normalized and sanctioned as a mechanism of the “war on terror” (Puar, 2016, para. 15). Thus, while we can and should question the limits of reading Israel and Palestine through a US-based framework of decoloniality, it is also worth questioning the limits of geographic and historical particularity when both Islamophobic and anti-Semitic violences have historically been so uniquely trans/inter/national in their expressions.

In closing, the question of exceptionalism again brings me back to the phrase my faculty union organizers deployed in their response to my inquiry about expressing solidarity with SJP protesters: “without incident.” Though I recognize this phrase was used to refer to the ostensibly “non-violent” conclusion of SJP’s encampment, it feels impossible to ignore the insidiousness of how “without incident” deploys purposely compartmentalized, presentist logics (i.e. “the current encampment in Lawrence, Kansas has ended, and thus no ongoing concerns exist”) to maintain and naturalize Palestine as “preordained for injury and maiming” (Puar, 2017, p. 65). Genocide is default, not incident. What possibilities emerge when we intentionally trace transnational movements of power, economics, and history towards reimagining the very colonial frames that artificially close us off from seeing “the entangled workings” (Puar, 2017, p. ix) of US-Israeli cultural, political, and educational institutions in naturalizing genocide? How can we rethink the terms of incident, exception, and comparison to critically open up, rather than contain?

 

References

Amiri, F. (2024, May 1). House passes bill to expand definition of antisemitism amid growing campus protests over Gaza war. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinian-campus-protests-columbia-congress-df4ba95dae844b3a8559b4b3ad7e058a

Atallah, Devin G. (2023, October 24). Beyond Grief: To Love and Stay with Those Who Die in Our Arms. Institute for Palestine Studies. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654491

Benjamin, O. (2008, July 11). Roots of the Neoliberal Takeover in Israel. Challenge Magazine. https://www.challenge-mag.com/article_author/benjamin-orly/

Butler, J. (2023, October 13). The Compass of Mourning. London Review of Books, 45(20). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning

Banville, M.[@banville_morgan]. (2024, April 4). Wait are we just going to talk about ‘responsibility’ and ‘social justice’ but completely ignore the silent protesters rn? Am I missing something #4C24 [Tweet]. X. https://x.com/banville_morgan/status/1775918805556027519?s=46&t=14WVQw7lkecUiRzytNnlLA

Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English (CARBTE). (2023). Statement on Palestine Genocide from NCTE’s Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. National Council of Teachers of English Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jvk-vK79vw7q0AUtqxwiutMJYgP9mA2E/view

Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). (n.d.). CCCC Committees and Task Forces. Conference on College Composition and Communication. Retrieved July 15, 2024, from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/committees

Fránquiz, M. E., Rodrigo, S., Perry, T. B., Kinloch, V., Garcia, A., & Kirkpatrick, E. (2023, November 16). A Statement from NCTE Leadership. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). https://ncte.org/a-statement-from-ncte-leadership-november-16-2023/

Grayson, M. L., Kareem, J., & Novotny, Maria. (2023). CCCC Ukraine Statement of Support. Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/cccc-ukraine-statement-of-support

Hafetz, J., & Aziz, S. (2023, December 27). How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=478390

Hill, M. L., & Plitnick, M. (2021). Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. The New Press.

Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (2011). Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Ed.). (2016). A Call for Consistency: Palestinian Resistance and Radical US Women of Color. In Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (pp. 74–78). South End Press.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions erupt into open conflict. (2021, May 17). Vox. https://www.vox.com/22440330/israel-palestine-gaza-airstrikes-hamas-updates-2021

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Pritha Prasad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas specializing in rhetoric and writing studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, and critical university studies. Her research tracks how institutions of higher education discursively and materially negotiate and dis/engage the rhetorics and world-making practices of antiracist and decolonial movements both in and beyond the university. At KU, Prasad teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical theory and history, composition and writing studies, critical university studies, and cultural rhetorics.