The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Kristi M. Wilson, Soka University of America

 

Dear members of the University community,
The University administration respects all student protests, just not this one. Students have fought for many important causes over the years, and their right to protest is sacrosanct. In this case, however, we must arrest and slander them. 
— Andrew Patrick Clark, 2019

It is impossible to grieve in the first-person singular. We always grieve for someone and with someone. Grieving connects us in ways that are subtly and candidly material. I am not yet sure which group I should join, where to envision myself, on whose shoulder to cry. I know that pain frequently finds its own allies. 
— Christina Rivera Garza, 2020 (p. 11)

I teach composition and rhetoric at a small, private, liberal arts university in Orange County. My research centers on visual rhetoric and I have spent much of my academic career writing about visual representation (cinema) and genocide and the battle against memory oblivion. Most genocide studies scholars work to preserve memories of atrocities, hoping that they might contribute in some small way to genocide avoidance in the future. As we have seen in the past and as we are witnessing today, the battle against genocide and its relentless companion, denial and oblivion, takes place in writing, in media, on the streets and often involves questions pertaining to property (private or government owned).

 

Graduation season 2024.

I begin this essay just one week after an historical, contentious, 2024 college graduation season in the US. Protests in support of Palestinian lives continued in the streets across the globe and inspired solidarity encampments on college campuses. As students and supportive faculty demanded and created spaces for Palestine on their campuses, they were answered with police raids, suspensions, arrests, firings and expulsions. Raz Segal, a genocide studies scholar who received an offer to direct the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies saw his offer withdrawn and was labeled an “extremist” for calling Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide. In an interview for Democracy Now, Segal did not mince words about the implications of his firing for students and academia at large: it . . . “spells the end of this idea of free inquiry, of academic freedom, of research and teaching — and all in the service, of course, of supporting an extremely violent state” (Democracy Now, 6-18-24). Segal added:

There is a case of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice. The chief prosecutor of International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, has requested arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes and crimes against humanity. . . an international outcry. Dozens of Holocaust and genocide studies scholars, not only me, who have spoken about genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza, or at least a serious risk of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza.

As I prepare for the Fall 2024 semester, which starts at my university with a “great ancient works” general education course, I struggle to organize my ideas from what feels like a fog of cognitive dissonance. I reflect on the fact that, once again, speaking truthfully and speaking out is a dangerous endeavor. Socrates is usually remembered as the founding father (of “Western” philosophy and/or civilization) rather than as a radical activist who resisted the propaganda of the elite of his day. The Apology of Socrates is a lesson in the power of education and a warning for future generations that the path to free-thinking, educational development, and honest communication (following one's daimon: inner voice) often demands conviction and risk.

Rhetor means speaker in Attic Greek and the orator was a skilled public speaker. As those of us who teach rhetoric and composition know well, teaching students to find their voices, to see through propaganda using scholarly evidence, to hone and target their communication skills, can be challenging and sometimes dangerous.

Panicked, hypocritical politicians swiftly resort to force in order to quell the movement, fearing its global expansion. Repression is enacted to stifle voices challenging the status quo. Police and National Guards are deployed, arresting students who were expelled just hours earlier for speaking out against the violence in Palestine. From Gaza to New York and other major cities worldwide, I want to express deep gratitude for these voices. (Letter to Amira Hass from her friend in Gaza, shared on Democracy Now, May 17, 2024)

Only citizen males were allowed a speaking platform in Athens. The city did not belong to women, slaves, and metics (resident foreigners). As we know from the fate of Socrates, speaking freely could result in defamation of character, (however comically achieved in Aristophanes’ Clouds) and in death. In short, Socrates might have been the earliest philosopher of record to have been what Naomi Klein calls “deplatformed” for his public speech acts.

In Doppleganger (2023), Klein decries deplatforming (a kind of high-tech cancellation) as an abuse of power that can take many forms and, ultimately, results in what she refers to as the scholasticide:

well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India’s Hindu-supremacist government. (p. 91)

We are experiencing scholasticide in the world today as universities and schools in Gaza are destroyed by bombings and as university faculty, presidents, and students here in the US are fired, expelled, not renewed, or resign.

There is a dangerous flattening–an uncreative propensity toward sameness–inherent in the surveillance of thought and language policing that characterizes recent, callous administrative responses to students protesting the genocide in Gaza and demanding space for Palestinian lives, calling for peace, and practicing civil disobedience on university campuses. Flattening, bulldozing, erasing, shifting the baseline–as I write, our ability to witness is being diminished (enclosed) with every passing day. Gaza has now surpassed Haiti and Mexico as the most dangerous place in the world for journalists and the US House of representatives has voted to ban the State Department from citing the Gaza death toll.[1] After reading the most recent death tolls in the house on June 28, 2024 which amounted to 37,700 dead, 15,000 of them children, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib added: “There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all, not when they’re alive and now not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial.”

Anna Tsing’s notions of “shifting baseline syndrome” and ruined landscapes feel especially important as we witness a rush to censor academic voices (of students and faculty), to bulldoze over student encampments, to deplatform university presidents, to ban reporting of the numbers of dead, to shroud or exclude images of cities in ruins and dead bodies, to murder journalists and scholars, to ban calling a genocide and genocide, to threaten with police violence:

As humans reshape the landscape, we forget what was there before. Ecologists call this forgetting the “shifting baseline syndrome.” Our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality. Admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements often entails forgetting many others. Forgetting, in itself, remakes landscapes, as we privilege some assemblages over others. (2017, p. 6)

 

The Active Voice.

I started my professional career as a graduate student worker in the University of California system teaching composition and rhetoric under the supervision of Linda Brodkey. I joined other graduate student workers each academic quarter in multi-campus coordinated protests and strikes as we occupied space on our university campuses and struggled for the right to unionize. University administrators asserted that we did not have this right because we were not employees, we were students enjoying the privilege of mentorship (which included among other “privileges” an unmanageable workload, ballooning student loans, and low pay). Back then we were supported with leadership, and office space by the United Auto Workers union and mentoring by the faculty who joined our teach-ins and picket lines. Eventually, after sixteen years of continuous peaceful actions, graduate student teacher assistants were finally recognized as workers. 

At UC San Diego, I found the interdisciplinary, intersectional challenges of teaching in Rhetoric and Composition liberating. Later, as a lecturer in the Stanford Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) Andrea Lunsford’s adage “everything is an argument” underscored a sense of total academic freedom to push the boundaries of rhetorical thinking. The idea that everything is an argument does not imply that everything is equally arguable and therefore truth is relative, as much as the post-pandemic alternative facts era might suggest. Rather, Lunsford encouraged students to question all forms of evidence and to challenge authoritarian pronouncements and final definitions of important terms (like worker or genocide). Language is power. Language is contractual. Language can be weaponized. Language is paradigm shifting. For Lunsford, and for those of us fortunately enough to be mentored by her, language and rhetoric were held in high regard, as world-changing tools for students, whose voices would eventually travel beyond the confines of academia.

As a later stage academic, I find myself in the company of fellow faculty members from a range of academic fields, former State Department members, lawyers, politicians, healthcare workers, and journalists who struggle to function ethically in states of suspended animation where speaking about Palestine is concerned. Many of us work at institutions whose missions and values statements encourage enlightenment ideals and visionary, often peace-oriented, contributions to global society.

UCLA’s primary purpose as a public research university is the creation, dissemination, preservation and application of knowledge for the betterment of our global society. To fulfill this mission, UCLA is committed to academic freedom in its fullest terms. (Mission and Values)

At Columbia, we strive to educate future generations, create knowledge that will take humanity forward, and invest in community, both locally and globally. Our mission cannot succeed without a commitment to thoughtful, rigorous debate that respects our collective rights to learn, work, and live together, free of bigotry, intimidation, and harassment. (Values in Action)

U-M is a public institution with a deep public ethos. Our mission to serve the people of Michigan and the world is deeply rooted in our ethos and identity as a public institution. Through our engagement we can directly benefit the society that supports us by combining our expertise with that of people who live in communities, both around us and around the world, to build on their own capacities and to maximize and realize their opportunities. (Principles & Values)

University mission statements are social contracts; guideposts toward the betterment of the world’s communities. They provide justification for the higher education project. All university stakeholders (faculty, students, administrators and other workers) are ethically bound by them. The neoliberal liberal arts paradox lies somewhere between a university’s argument about its character (its rhetoric, its mission statement, its brand) and its actual practices (police raids on protesters, censorship, faculty firings, blacklisting).

In April, 2024, amidst an already dizzying array of academic headlines, colleagues and I watched in horror as Columbia University President Nemat Minouche Shafik attempted to fire visiting professor of Modern Arab Studies, Mohamed Abdou on live television during a congressional hearing and without due process. This felt like a violation of both the academic social contract and academic freedom of speech. As if a new era of McCarthyism had begun.

Columbia President Minouche Shafik announced that the university was cutting ties with Abdou during a congressional hearing last month about antisemitism on campus. Abdou was one of five professors named by the school administrator but the only one without the relative protection of tenure. His one-year contract ends this month.

“What she effectively did was blacklist me globally,” Abdou told me of Shafik’s testimony. (Lennard, 2024)

Earlier this year, after testifying at congressional hearings on the topic of student support for Palestine on their campuses, Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard’s President (after just six months in the position), and Liz Magill resigned her tenure as University of Pennsylvania for similar reasons two days later. In stark contrast to Mohamed Abdou’s position, neither Gay nor Magill had a history of expressing solidarity with the plight of Palestinian people or of supporting their students rising up for Palestine.[2] In a January 3, 2024 opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “What Just Happened at Harvard is Bigger Than Me,” Gay wrote about the attack on her academic qualifications that: “Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.”

 

Neoliberal anti-logic, deplatforming, and the ‘visceraless’ state of higher education.

In her analysis of the ruined landscapes and collective trauma in Mexico that resulted from state violence, Cristina Rivera Garza (2020) defines the visceraless state as one whose administration relies on an abandonment of responsibilities:

the neoliberal state put aside its responsibility for the bodies of its citizens, when it stopped “intervening on their behalf,” the well-being of its communities, the relationship that had been established with and from the people at the beginning of the twentieth century, slowly but inevitably began to dissolve. (p. 21)

A visceraless state (one that no longer cares about the bodies of its citizens) lives in complete submission to the economic interests of globalization and colonialism.

As students rose up across the US and around the world demanding an intervention on behalf of the civilians in Gaza, demanding the prevention of a preventable genocide, they were greeted with arrests, suspensions, police aggressions. Visceraless administrations did intervene, but primarily to protect university property or to deplatform faculty who supported students. They failed to intervene on behalf of their immediate community members (protesting students and faculty) and on behalf of Gazan civilians (their global community neighbors).

In January, 2024, 87-year old Palestinian painter and former tenured professor at Indiana University Samia Halaby comments on the visceraless state of higher education in response to her retrospective exhibit at her alma mater being cancelled. Halaby suggests that her cancellation, her deplatforming, is “much larger than I am”:

I remember the University of Cincinnati with a great deal of affection for the education we received there. I remember it being an atmosphere that was very open and radical. My teachers were all inspired by the resistance painters of the time. . . they were in admiration of the industrial union movement. The great depression was still in people’s memory and the professors were all very enlightened and advanced and talked a lot about academic freedom. My feeling is that I wish I could bring that batch of attitudes of those professors to modern…contemporary American education. . . My feeling towards what happened to me is that the administration has lost sight of their responsibility to the community of students who are there. They’re trying to stop students from moving with thinking, with their creative process politically. They’re being more responsible to pronouncements from the government and from threats perhaps from parts of the government . . . a division is taking place in their position of having administrative power but no responsibility to real community. I feel the students, the repression of the students right now in the country who are the most advanced . . . the new partnership between the young Palestinians and all they are doing and the young Jews and all that they are doing. . . they’re so disciplined and determined and clear thinking. I’m really in admiration of them and I think that this act of suspension, of cancellation, is as much against them as it is against me and the curator of this show…This is much larger than I am. There is suppression of students throughout the U.S. there is suppression of faculty. (Democracy Now, 1-18-2024)

 

Plagues, protests and scholasticidal tendencies.

University faculty have floated uneasily for some time now between progressive, optimistic, world-making university mission statements and an increased reliance upon the seductive convenience of neoliberal, anti-democratic platforms for organization that promise easy, depoliticized paths toward quantifiable “productivity” (“clean data”). But these platforms, even as they offer the illusion of flawless, disembodied academic performance, often conceal racist, homophobic, exclusionary, misogynist, scholasticidal underpinnings. Therein lies the neoliberal liberal arts paradox.

Calls for change were already in the air on university campuses across the US long before October 7, and long before the outbreak of COVID-19 forced most higher education workers into their homes. From declining enrollments, to sex abuse scandals, to institutionalized racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and sexism, students have been demanding change and using their voices as stakeholders in their universities for decades. In the wake of the 2008 recession, “a veritable tsunami of mass rebellion not seen since at least 1968” (Robinson, 2022, p. 45) erupted around the world and remained steady until the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns (and even then, the giant wave receded for obvious reasons, but did not disappear). From Bangkok, to New York (and other US cities), to Spain, to Greece, to Chile, millions of people sat in, marched, and went on strike against inequality, dictatorship, climate change denial, agricultural and riparian rights, corporate corruption, and police brutality. And many of these pre-pandemic protests had distinctly feminist characteristics; the 2017 Women’s Marches, 2019 protests in Khartoum, and the 2019 social uprising in Chile, to name a few (Robinson, 2022, p. 46).

For decades, administrators have responded by shielding themselves behind walls of ever-more-efficient technologies–keeping would-be dissenting faculty tasked with the implementation and maintenance of their careers via tech platforms–and by requiring faculty to adhere to ever-expanding, ever more litigious codes of conduct. Such actions betray willful blindness to the reality that our students either come from communities calling for change or feel an affinity toward and empathy with those suffering.

In Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (2022), William I. Robinson suggests that “the pandemic lockdowns served as dry runs for how digitalization may allow the dominant groups to step up restructuring time and space and to exercise greater control over the global working class” (p. 12).  As much as some faculty might like to deny it, and contrary to ivory tower logic, we too are part of the global working class. Byung-Chul Han (2017) argues that we are living and working under a digital panopticon in which “data is not surrendered under duress so much as offered out of an inner need. That is why the digital panopticon proves so efficient” (p. 9). Following the trend toward automation, administrators have replaced staff members with big-data automated platforms such as former PeopleSoft CEO, David Duffield’s, company Workday, or its rival, ADP, in the name of transparency and efficiency; as they rely more heavily on automatically generated student surveys to evaluate the pedagogical contributions of their faculty, as they encourage faculty to flatten and standardize their courses through the use of programs like Grammarly, Duolingo, Zotero, etc., little by little, faculty allow themselves to be dominated and controlled and their unique contributions diminished. Faculty are reduced to sets of micro data that have the convenient collateral effect of predicting “deviant” behavior for administrators (Benasayag, 2021). The type of tech-power referred to here comes in friendly packaging and is presented as a vehicle toward convenience, quantifiability, and freedom, a mask for less friendly, more toxic forms of tech power developed on our university campuses. Think Lockheed Martin. Think Raytheon Technologies. Think Caterpillar Inc. Think Google. Think Nvidia. . . .

As faculty negotiated a return to campus life post-Covid, post zoom teaching, many of us, perhaps naively wondered:

Could we search for new paradigms of inclusion?

Would we create wider, horizontal, nets of participation where academic governance is concerned?

Would we now destroy the artificial bridges between students and faculty that prop up antiquated and fragile, myths of expertise in favor of participatory transdisciplinarity?

Or would we double down on our reliance on big data (with its embedded surveillance technology), sacrificing academic freedom and faculty self-governance?

As faculty would we acquiesce to being tasked, controlled, and surveilled?

Is US higher education now part of a triumvirate of power, along with transnational capital and the US State department, as Robinson would suggest? The rush to defend university property (its assets) over the protesting bodies of students (its stakeholders) by use of armed police forces suggests as much. Halaby and Robinson see the US university campus as a microcosms of the world at large. On the suspensions of university faculty who are critical of the US/Israeli government actions in Gaza, Halaby had the following to say:

there is a huge gap growing between administrative layers and the government and the students. Professors, workers, staff, and general population in this country. You see it very clearly. You see huge demonstrations not only in the U.S. but all over the world and this whole disregard of governments to what the people are asking for is in miniature form, taking place at Indiana University and is this very thing I’m talking about, this division in the minds of administrators. They no longer owe anything to the students and to the faculty or to an open atmosphere of learning and discourse, as though disagreement, differences of opinion is a negative thing. It is a kind of attempt at mind control…you can only think that way, and then you’re OK, you can be a student, but if you want to discourse and see other points of view, you’re not allowed. . . so, it’s very backward. (1-18-2024, Democracy Now)

The neoliberal liberal arts paradox simultaneously upholds the visceraless administrative state of higher education and the unwritten social contracts between students, faculty, and citizens of the world, often inspired by the visionary leaders/resisters institutions of higher learning claim to hold dear (Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, etc.).

Many of our students understand through their lived experience of racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, various pressures to conform to authority and management or, in the words of Walter Mignolo (2011), they understand the “effects experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the receiving end of global designs to colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural resources), authority (management by the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize knowledges (languages, categories of thoughts, belief systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity)” (p. 45). What happens when we admit, as my colleague Aneil Rallin suggests, that “good writing rarely emerges from following rules. Good writing emerges when writers take risks and are encouraged to take risks. Good writing seldom emerges without risks (2019, p. 55).

 

Resisting memory oblivion.

Can writing demand the restitution of a Visceral State? Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who confronted the atrocities of the military dictatorship in Argentina, and like the Arpillera movement in Chile, which tried to challenge Pinochet’s horror, and like the relatives of the disappeared in Mexico, who tread on this land of open graves searching for their loved ones, claiming both justice and restitution? Can writing keep us company--we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope? (Garza, 2020, p. 7)

I first developed an interest in genocide studies at the International Genocide Studies Association conference in 2004. Part of the conference included an optional visit to the ESMA (the most important clandestine center for torture, detention, and disappearance during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976 - 1983). Argentine genocide studies scholar Daniel Feierstein procured access to the 38-acre facility and conference attendees were offered a private tour of the spaces of what Feierstein (2014) refers to as political genocide. We saw a prison maternity ward, where women were allowed to give birth, only to have their babies taken and adopted out to “good” families of the military’s choosing; we saw torture rooms; we saw rooms where political prisoners were photographed; we saw rooms where political prisoners waited for their “flights of death” over the Rio de la Plata; and we saw rooms where propaganda was created for complicit news outlets.

The ESMA was a 38-acre death plantation, enclosed behind walls that bordered one of the busiest avenues in Buenos Aires. Like many of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe, the ESMA was located in a populated neighborhood and its smooth functioning relied upon a fascistic amnestic drive toward progress; a willful blindness. Thanks to the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who took up space and demonstrated in front of the Casa Rosada (presidential palace) during the Dictatorship years, as well as countless other community and activist groups, the ESMA did not fall victim to the amnestic drive toward progress to become a shopping mall or housing development. Today the ESMA complex houses the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory–Former Clandestine Center of Detention, Torture and Extermination. As of 2023, the ESMA is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, thanks largely to the demands that the state institutions reckon with the past.

           

Resisting the plantation. Resisting digital dictatorship.

Given what we now know about the ways in which the pandemic has shaped the global landscape, can we resist what Robinson calls the “digitalized dictatorship”; a system that now is “pushing toward expansion through militarization, wars, and conflicts, through a new round of violent dispossession, and through further plunder of the state” (2022, p. 12). The threat of shifting baseline syndrome is more important today than ever for university faculty members as we witness the waning protections of tenure, punitive re-interpretations of academic freedom, and the persecutions of colleagues who attempt to hold space on their campuses and in their writings for the people of Palestine.

Robinson reminds us that “savage inequalities are explosive. They fuel mass protest by the oppressed and lead the ruling groups to deploy an ever more omnipresent global police state to contain the rebellion of the global working and popular classes” (2022, p. 11). Robinson warns that the battle for the post-pandemic world is now being waged (especially on university campuses!) and that the stakes could not be higher.

With tech titans like Elon Musk tweeting that “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it” in response to the Bolivian government’s resistance to Tesla’s rush to mine lithium from its lands, with Supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor declaring that “the President is now a king above the law” in response to a recent ruling that grants presidents exclusive powers of immunity, I could not agree more.[3]

 

The Unwritten Social Contract: encampments, enclosures, uncommons.

I’m thinking about a 2017 book, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives by Macarena Gómez-Barris. In it, she interrogates Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s visual theories of power, whose origins point to the modern European state, by encouraging us to look back further in time and in so doing, to more accurately understand the colonial power dynamics that haunt the neoliberal age. Gomez-Barris suggests that theories of control and surveillance that started with European modernity “render invisible the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the reservation, quintessential colonial spaces where power was consolidated through visual regimes”; spaces whose ghostly residue still holds sway in our institutions (2017, p. 6). As witnesses to a live-streamed genocide in Gaza and to a powerful response largely generated in the streets and by our students, as they confront the colonial nature of the academic spaces they inhabit, Gómez-Barris’ extractive view resonates. It feels visceral, embodied.

In their 2018 book, A world of many worlds, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser propose the spatial idea of an uncommons; predicated on a notion of the heterogeneity of experience and negotiation, and running counter to enclosures (p. 18). The uncommons . . .admits that “what counts as knowledge is going to be intimately bound up with the question as to what counts as relations” (p. 29). Can those of us working inside the hierarchical enclosure of higher education today find our own uncommons? What would voices from an uncommons sound like? Why would we write from the space of an uncommons and for whom?           

Because writing, by nature, invites us to consider the possibility that the world can, in fact, be different. . . Because those who write will never adapt. . . (Garza, 2020, p. 170)

In 2024 her address to the Columbia Journalism School graduating class, Israeli journalist Amira Hass reminds the graduates that regardless of what university administrators do or say, there is an “unwritten social contract” between journalists and the citizens of the world. For Hass, a Haaretz correspondent with over three decades of experience reporting from Gaza, to be a journalist:

is to resist the normalization of evil and of injustice, because we are so used to so — there is so much injustice in this world, not in — everywhere. And we have to use our — the unwritten social contract between us and citizens the world over to scrutinize, to monitor, to challenge power, centers of power, the abusive power. Any power can be abusive or is abusive, only we have the power to at least try and restrain it. I think this is — this should be the role — not the only role, but this should be a main role of journalists, to restrain power, wherever it is being manifested. (May 17, 2024, Democracy Now)

As educators, what is the unwritten social contract between us and the citizens of the world? The neoliberal liberal arts paradox simultaneously upholds the visceraless administrative state of higher education and the unwritten social contracts between students, faculty, and citizens of the world, often inspired by the visionary leaders/resisters institutions of higher learning claim to hold dear.

I see hope in the wave of student peaceful protest in solidarity with Palestine. As a scholar who has attended several International Genocide Studies conferences and been influenced by the work of Daniel Feierstein, Omer Bartov, Adam Jones, and others, I join with countless scholars, journalists, academic members of the University Network for Human Right, the International Court of Justice, and everyday people who reject the illogical notion that supporting Palestinian personhood and opposing the genocidal actions of the Israeli state constitutes antisemitism and/or a terrorist speech act, or makes academic spaces uncomfortable for Jewish students (many of whom are members of Jewish Voice for Peace and thus helping to organize the global movement to hold space and speak up for Palestinian lives). I see hope, like I did as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, in the labor movement in the U.S. and around the world.

On December 1, 2023 The UAW joined The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to sign a petition calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza adding, “[F]rom opposing fascism in WWII to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the CONTRA war, the UAW has consistently stood for justice across the globe” (UAW.org). The petition reads:

We, members of the American labor movement, mourn the loss of life in Israel and Palestine. We express our solidarity with all workers and our common desire for peace in Palestine and Israel, and we call on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza. We cannot bomb our way to peace. We also condemn any hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, or anyone else.

In the marketplace of higher education, where students are “increasingly dissatisfied customers”  (Rowan, 2021) can we, as faculty, craft our own unwritten social contracts to resist mind enclosures?

Injustices?

Normalizations?

Scholasticide?

Can those of us in the field of rhetoric and composition find strength enough in our own voices to teach others to find theirs? I am inspired by Cristina Rivera Garza’s faith in the power of language, and I end this attempt to speak about the unspeakable with her words: “. . . language--the humblest and most powerful force available to us. . . [With language] we activate the potency of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write . . . Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing” (2020, p. 8).

 

References

Benasayag, M. (2021). The tyranny of algorithms. Europa Editions UK.

Clark, A. P. (2023, December 1). A message from the chancellor on recent student protest. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-message-from-the-chancellor-on-the-recent-student-protest

de la Cadena, M., & Blaser, M. (Eds.). (2018). A world of many worlds. Duke University Press.

Democracy Now. (2024, May 17). Resist the normalization of evil: Israeli reporter Amira Hass on Palestine & the role of journalism. Democracy Now. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/17/amira_hass_israel_palestine_gaza

Democracy Now. (2024, January 18). Palestinian artist Samia Halaby slams Indiana University for canceling exhibit over her support for Gaza. Democracy Now. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/18/censorship_palestinian_solidarity

Democracy Now. (2024, June 18). Holocaust scholar Raz Segal loses Univ. of Minnesota job offer for saying Israel is committing genocide. Democracy Now. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/18/raz_segal_university_of_minnesota

Feierstein, D. (2014). Genocide as social practice: Reorganizing society under the Nazis and Argentina's military juntas. Rutgers University Press.

Garza, C. R. (2020). Grieving: Dispatches from a wounded country. Feminist Press at CUNY.

Gay, C. (2024, January 3). What just happened at Harvard is bigger than me. New York Times.

Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Duke University Press.

Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso Books.

Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA.

Klein, N. (2023). Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world. Knopf Canada.

Lennard, N. (2024, May 16). University professors are losing their jobs over “New McCarthyism” on Gaza. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/

Mignolo, W. D. (2011). Epistemic disobedience and the decolonial option: A Manifesto. Transmodernity, 1(2), 3-23.

Mission and Values. https://www.ucla.edu/about/mission-and-values

Moore, R. (2021, January 17). The free-market gamble: Has Covid broken UK universities? Guardian UK.

Our Values. https://ourvalues.columbia.edu/

Principles & Values. https://engaged.umich.edu/about/principles-and-values/

Rallin, A. (2019). Dreads and open mouths: Living/teaching/writing queerly. Litwin Books.

Rebón, J. (2020). La no linealidad del cambio social. El futuro después del COVID-19. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/el_futuro_despues_del_covid-19.pdf

Robinson, W. I. (2022). Global civil war: Capitalism post-pandemic. PM Press.

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Kristi M. Wilson is Professor of Rhetoric and Humanities at Soka University of America. Her research and teaching interests include classics, film studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Dr. Wilson is the coeditor of Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (2007), Film and Genocide (2011), and Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (2014). She also serves on the editorial board and is a film review editor at Latin American Perspectives (SAGE Publications).