Why we must continue to raise our voice against aggressive Israeli settler colonialism

As a decolonization theorist, I find the fundamental question of Israeli settler colonialism as a guiding anchor to my theorizing work. As an exemplar of settler colonialism, the state of Israel continues to perpetuate a wide array of communicative tropes that justify its oppressive practices.

The oppression of colonialism is communicative. It is established, legitimized, and circulated through communicative resources and architectures.

Israeli settler colonialism works through multiple communicative inversions, the turning of materiality on its head to legitimize the infrastructure of colonial violence.

The communicative infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism marks the Palestinian people as terrorist to perpetuate its terror.

Palestinian claims to sovereignty are labeled as terrorist to sustain the Israeli apparatuses of colonial expansion.

The marking of the colonized subject as the source of terror is a fundamental communicative inversion that sustains the colonial project.

The colonizer has historically used this strategy, couched in the language of emancipation, to carry out its colonizing project. To the colonizer, labeling calls for anti-colonialism as racist, oppressive, terrorist, uncivil, and threats to security is intrinsic to the perpetuation of the oppressive colonizing practices.

This communicative inversion is tied to communicative erasure, the violence of erasing decolonizing articulations. Erasures are legitimized through inversions. Once anti-colonial speech is marked as racist, uncivil, oppressive, and terrorist, the colonizer can deploy the instruments of terror to pathologize and criminalize anti-colonial speech. Consider for instance the ways in which the language of anti-racism is deployed to silence the critics of Israeli settler colonialism. Across the globe, the instruments of settler colonialism networks through powerful structures to create the sites of erasure. Silencing the talk of anti-colonialism works to erase possibilities for decolonization.

It is in this backdrop that we must continue to raise our voices against Israeli settler colonialism. For any decolonization theorist, the call to decolonization must turn to the question of transforming the ongoing violence perpetuated by the colonial Israeli power in Palestine.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

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