Matthew Abraham

Interests

Teaching

Undergraduate CoursesRhetoric Traditions (ENGL 362)Introduction to Literary Analysis (ENGL 380)General Education 160A (Concepts in Postcolonial Theory)General Education 1601D (The Concept of Evil)Graduate CoursesENGL 696E Controversies in Rhetoric and CompositionENGL 696S Emerging Trends and Methods in Composition StudiesENGL 696S Emerging Trends and Methods in Rhetorical Studies

Research

Rhetoric and Composition, Ethnic Rhetorics, Rhetorics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Postcolonial Theory

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Abraham, M. (2021). Beyond Fragility and Prefigurative Politics in Anti-Racist Critiques in Rhetoric and Composition. Kendall Hunt.
• Abraham, M. (2022). The Lure of Disempowerment: Reclaiming Agency in the Age of CRT. Kendall-Hunt publishing.
• Abraham, M. (2022). The Lure of Disempowerment: Reclaiming Agency the Age of CRT. Kendall Hunt Publishing.
• Abraham, M., & Matzen, R. (2019). Weathering the Storm: Independent Writing Programs in the Age of Fiscal Austerity. Logan: Utah State University Press.
• Abraham, M. (2015). Toward a Critical Rhetoric on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Andersonville, SC: Parlor Press.
• Abraham, M. (2014). Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
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  Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine looks at the Question of Palestine as a site of controversy, a place of physical and intellectual repression as well as physical and intellectual resistance, a memory not to be forgotten, and a topos for thinking about liberation and empowerment. By examining the intellectual example of the late Edward Said in his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination, who emerged out of the tradition of the New York Intellectuals, Abraham explores Said's resistance as a Palestinian intellectual to the discourse of Zionism within the United States. In addition to Said's intellectual resistance, Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine looks at the most extreme forms of Palestinian physical resistance against Israeli occupation (suicide bombing), arguing that it constitutes a form of biopolitical intervention to advance communal memory and goals, although it is most frequently dismissed in the West as a nihilistic act with no connection to politics. By bringing together intellectual interventions such as Said's together with the most violent form of resistance on the ground, Abraham posits that the Question of Palestine is an issue that cannot be ignored as it intrudes into daily life, domestic debates, and foreign policy considerations.

Chapters

• Abraham, M. (2019). Palestinian Bodies in Erasure: Civility Rhetorics and the Bounds of the Permissible. In Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom:(p. 38). New York: Routledge.
• Abraham, M. (2021). entitled “Civility and the Bounds of the Permissible: Scholars of Color Embodying the Very Social-Political Dynamics at the Heart of Their Critiques.”. In Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education(pp 111-131). Routledge.
• Abraham, M. (2021). Civility and the bounds of the permissible: Scholars of color embodying the very social-political dynamics at the heart of their critiques. In Protest Rhetorics. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9780429282041-12
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  This chapter focuses on Steven Salaita’s tweets from the summer of 2014 to illustrate how civility becomes deployed in a larger struggle to control scholars of color seeking to bring clarity to, and shed light on, the various material and intellectual complicities informing the US-Israel-Palestinian conflict. It also focuses on what happened to Salaita with the self-promoting exercises of Jason Hill, which represent a predictable but nonetheless harmful form of political and intellectual opportunism. Expressing anger at the killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli munitions is, by definition, uncivilized - and for some - anti-Semitic because to recognize Palestinian pain and loss is to condemn Israel’s role in producing that pain and loss. To have given Salaita a place among the faculty at Illinois would be to grant the Palestinians, what the late Edward Said called, “the permission to narrate” - which supposedly represents an existential threat to Israel.
• Abraham, M. (2019). Recognizing and Saving Black Lives, Recognizing and Saving Palestinian Lives: The Power of Transnational Rhetorics in Locating the Commonality of Liberation Struggles. In Rhetorical Activism, 2nd Edition(p. 20). New York: Routledge.
• Abraham, M. (2020). Selim Bakri’s Quest for a Palestinian Identity: Hanna K. and the Palestinian “Permission to Narrate”. In Edited collection on Costa-Gavras's cinematic explorations(pp 24 double-spaced spaces in Microsoft word document). Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
• Abraham, M. (2019). Recognizing and saving black lives, recognizing and saving palestinian lives: The power of transnational rhetorics in locating the commonality of liberation struggles. In Transnational Rhetorics. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315144535-10
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  This chapter examines why comparisons between the Black Lives Matter movement and the various international efforts to liberate Palestinians from Israeli occupation are apt and consistent with rhetoric and composition’s focus on transnational and intersectional rhetorics. Both efforts represent attempts to find commonalities in the struggles of oppressed peoples seeking to transcend colonialism, white supremacy, and the oppression of people of color in specific contexts. The slow convergence between Black liberation in the United States and Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation and enclosure seems to come from a felt necessity, a recognition that both movements are working against political forces rooted in racism and neo-colonialism. By simply proclaiming that “Black Lives Matter” one works against the discursive and materially constructed reality that Black lives have historically not mattered in the United States. Black identity extremists then are to be vigilantly guarded against because of the potential threat they pose to state authority and those who represent that authority.
• Abraham, M. (2018). "The Palestinian Body in Protest". In Unruly Rhetorics(p. 22). University of Pittsburgh.
• Abraham, M. (2013). William L. McBride and the enduring commitment to intellectual freedom. In William McBride Festschrift. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
• Abraham, M. (2011). Developing activist rhetorics on Israel–Palestine: Resisting the depoliticization of the American academy. In Activist Rhetorics. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9780203846285
• Abraham, M. (2010). Developing activist rhetorics on Israel-Palestine: Resisting the depoliticization of the American academy. In Activist Rhetoric. Taylor and Francis.
• Abraham, M. (2009). Simply said: Edward Said and the New York intellectual tradition. In The New York Intellectuals. Purdue University Press.
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  1948 Palestinian dispossession at the hands of the yet-to-be-formed Israeli Defense Forces of the Haganah and the IZL (Irgun), Ha'aretz's Ari Shavit and the famed cultural critic Edward Said refl ected on the possibilities of an Israeli- Palestinian binational state, something Said had advocated on behalf of for quite some time-much before the failure of the Oslo Accords and Camp David II. Th is interview took place just a few months before the outbreak of violence that began the Second Intifada in the occupied territories, a possible reaction to the failure of the Camp II talks where, brought together by then-President Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, had supposedly off ered (in exchange for the Palestinian recognition of "Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state") Arafat nearly 80 percent of the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state, "a deal of a lifetime," although many considered the off er a call for Palestinian submission to a Bantustan arrangement reminiscent of the South African national territories.1 As he came to fully understand Said's nuanced position, which clearly placed reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians ahead of revenge or retribution for either group's historical grievances, and the identifi cation of a mutual interest in peace and coexistence in a future binational state before the assignment of blame, Shavit proclaimed, "You sound very Jewish." Said replied, "Of course. I'm the last Jewish intellectual. You don't know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these people here in America. So I'm the last one. Th e only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I'm a Jewish-Palestinian."2 Th e concept of a "Jewish-Palestinian," clearly provocative and intriguing in its attempt to employ notions of exile, loss, and refugeehood to understand the historical suff ering of two peoples that are engaged in a seeming death struggle in the Middle East, articulates a condition of loss, longing, and hopelessness for the modern age. A Jewish-Palestinian does not attempt to privilege the historical wrongs committed against one of the peoples within this binary over another, employing a superior sense of victimhood to deny the suff ering of the other side, but instead recognizes the singularity of each people's oppression and dispossession. Shavit's observation suggests that to be Jewish ("to be a Jew") is to occupy a specifi c political-historical space, a space within which someone appreciates the condition of exile and the insights it brings to the human experience. Historically speaking, to be a Jew is to be an exile. To be a Palestinian at this historical moment does not hold the same meaning, even though the stateless Palestinian living under occupation may know something more about what it means to be an exile than an Israeli or American Jew. I do not intend to employ the term Jew as a caricature but instead to articulate how a concept of "Jewishness" can be used to understand all human suff ering, even Palestinian suff ering. As a condition, Jewishness has signifi ed the capacity to empathize with suffering, homelessness, wandering, and powerlessness. Can one honestly describe Jews-at this present historical moment-as suff ering, homeless, wandering, and powerless? Ironically, these adjectives aptly describe the Palestinian condition under Israeli occupation; however, when one understands that antisemitism and Orientalism are diff erent sides of the same coin of age-old hatreds directed against distinct populations, whether these are Jewish or Muslim, an interesting complementarity emerges. Antisemitism, as a European-generated hatred directed against Jews, has been eff ectively transferred to the Palestinian Arab in his or her resistance against Israeli occupation. Palestinian Arab resistance to Israeli occupation is confi gured as antisemitism because the occupiers of what was previously Palestinian land are Jewish. Orientalism, as a discourse that essentially constructs the "existence" of Eastern peoples such as Arabs, is also a European creation that allowed for colonial domination through the wedding of power and knowledge. Th e domestication of the East and its peoples through Western social sciences such as anthropology and linguistics created discursive targets through which to understand and control non-Europeans. Said described this process in great detail in his Orientalism: Th e Jewish embrace of the state of Israel signals an end to the Jewish Question and the beginning of the Palestinian Question; however, can one say that the Jewish Question ever really ended? Zionism, as a form of Jewish nationalism, has ironically ensured the perpetuation of the Jewish Question and concomitantly the Palestinian Question. Both questions, as Joseph Massad has suggested in his Th e Persistence of the Palestinian Question, are intimately connected; one question can not be solved without turning to the other. Analyzing the Palestinian condition, then, requires a precise accounting of the place of non-Jews within the economy of Zionism, a task that Said made both personal and professional. Although some have argued that Said compromised his status as a public intellectual because of his embrace of Palestinian nationalism, the evidence suggests a far more complicated picture.4 Said's commitment to bearing witness to grave injustice (not just the injustices committed against Palestinians) as well as documenting the intellectual evasions surrounding diffi cult human questions about neglect and dispossession (and not just the Palestinian Question) stands as a testament to his special type of intellectual style that was reminiscent of the early New York Intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt. Arendt, because of her critical statements about Zionism as outlined in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of Evil and an essay titled "Zionism Reconsidered," was plagued by controversy in the later part of her life for questioning the foundations of Jewish nationalism and the necessity of a Jewish state. Her most controversial work interrogated the role of the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) in cooperating with the Th ird Reich, as these Councils delivered Jews over to the Nazis for eventual extermination in the concentration camps.5 Th at Arendt tackled such taboo and explosive subjects as part of her intellectual work suggests that she was committed to exposing the contradictions and inconsistencies within lachrymose and easily formulated narratives about the Holocaust and Jewish suff ering; her doing so provides greater insight into the human condition. Said approached the problems of Zionism from a far diff erent subjectivity but with the same acumen. His "American Zionism: Th e Last Taboo" raises disturbing questions about how Israeli nationalism has always been perverted by rampant militarism, which has had the potential to compromise the moral integrity of American Jews who support Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.6 In writing what they have about Zionism from their very diff erent positions, Arendt and Said assumed an almost pariah-like status among segments of the public intensely focused on promoting Israelism, if not Zionism. Such a status is a prerequisite for moral rebellion and intellectual responsibility. Arendt explained her own perspective in a letter to Gershom Scholem: Th is sort of intellectual independence and refusal of intellectual orthodoxy characterized Arendt's positions on Zionism and Israel throughout her career. Ironically, she and Noam Chomsky-who has been considered (for over fi ft y years) a virulent critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians-were proud Zionists in the 1940s before the actual founding of Israel in 1948, at which point it became known that there could be no rapprochement with the Arabs because of the UN partition and growing Jewish immigration into what was once considered Palestine. In his Th e Politics of Dispossession, Said writes "I go so far as to be convinced by Rosa Luxemburg's statement that one cannot impose one's own political solution on another people against their will. As a Palestinian who has suff ered loss and deprivations, I cannot morally accept regaining my rights at the expense of another people's deprivation."8 As perhaps the last true follower of Adorno, Said brought an enlightened skepticism toward all nationalisms, including Palestinian nationalism, realizing the necessity of creating conditions for noncoercive community through the bringing together of discrepant experiences, an indication of his commitment to exposing how nationalism and its attendant cultural discourses oft en separate people from one another based upon little more than territorial divides. Explaining the almost religious fervor with which such divides are policed and protected became Said's enduring passion, an eff ort that permeated both his literary criticism and his political work on behalf of the Palestinian people. © 2009 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Journals/Publications

• Abraham, M. (2016). Edward Said and the Recuperation of the Human. Saba Ülkesi, 46, 4.
• Kalbfleisch, E. (2016). Special Colloquia on Independent Writing Programs. College Composition and Communciation, 68(1), 42.
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  This special colloquia on independent writing programs has been published in College Composition and Communication. It was published in the September 2016 special issue focused on "Political-economies of composition."
• Abraham, M. (2015). Conceptualizing Academic Freedom After the Salaita Case. Journal of First Amendment Studies, 6.
• Abraham, M. (2014). “Recognizing the Effects of the Past in the Present: Theorizing A Way Forward on the Israel- Palestine Conflict". JAC: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetoric, Culture and Politics, 33(1&2), 28.

Presentations

• Abraham, M. (2017, July). "Self-constitutive Rhetoric in the Service of Dissent". Rhetoric Society of Europe Conference on "Unity and Division". Norwich, England: Rhetoric Society of Europe.
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  This talk focused on Haneen Zoabi's July 2016 speech about Israel's handling of the Mavi Mamara incident.
• Abraham, M. (2017, March). College Composition and Communication Think Tank: Think Tank on Taking Action as An Organization. College Composition and Communication. Portland, OR: College Composition and Communciation.
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  From the program:Professional organizations are expected to issue responses to eventsthat come to the attention of national and international media relevantto their areas of commitment and expertise. While CCCC has a longhistory of preparing and issuing resolutions and statements addressingsuch matters (e.g., language rights, working conditions for writingteachers, writing assessment), it lacks a nimble means by which toaddress developments of concern to its membership that merit quickresponse.This will be a working session in which attendees will participatein developing a set of concrete proposals for how CCCC might beenabled to take quick and appropriate action in response to issues ofconcern to its membership relevant to its area of commitment andexpertise. Specifically, this Think Tank will be devoted to identifyingand articulating• the range of concerns arising in the public media to which CCCCas an organization should respond;• the organizational mechanisms by which CCCC might determinehow best to respond to such matters;• the forms such responses might take.Portland Ballroom
• Abraham, M. (2016, Spring (May)). Special panel on the Race, Rhetoric, and the Prophetic: The Obama Presidency in Relief. Rhetoric Society of America. Atlanta, GA: U of A.
• Abraham, M. (2016, Spring). “Racial Microaggressions in Theoretical Spaces: Assessing Rhetoric and Composition’s Relations to People of Color.”. Conference on College Composition and Communication. Houston, TX: U of A.

Reviews

• Abraham, M. (2016. Protecting the Intellectual Mission in the Age of Neoliberal Expansion(p. 11). Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World Review.
• Abraham, M. (2016. Review: Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016(p. 6). Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture.