The incivility patrol: Debojoy Chanda, ‘Gendering “Incivility”: Dissent in American Academia in the Era of Zionism’, in Purna Banerjee, Priya Singh (eds), Fractured Spaces: Intersectional Approaches to Migration and Displacement, Springer 2026, pp. 179-194 | settler colonial studies blog

The incivility patrol: Debojoy Chanda, ‘Gendering “Incivility”: Dissent in American Academia in the Era of Zionism’, in Purna Banerjee, Priya Singh (eds), Fractured Spaces: Intersectional Approaches to Migration and Displacement, Springer 2026, pp. 179-194

27Jul26

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how Zionism, as a structuring ideology of settler colonialism, has come to delimit the contours of dissent, academic freedom, and acceptable speech within American higher education through a gendered politics of “civility.” Taking as its point of departure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s “un-hiring” of Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita in 2014, it situates this incident within a longer genealogy of American academia’s complicity in the occupation of indigenous and Palestinian lands. It argues that Zionist discourse operates through a masculinist grammar which renders Palestinian dissent ‘uncivil,’ excessive, and disposable, while simultaneously feminizing and precarizing dissenting academic labor. By reading Salaita’s case alongside contemporary crackdowns on pro-Palestinian campus protests following Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023, the chapter illustrates how the First Amendment of the United States Constitution functions at cross purposes with settler colonial amnesia embedded within land-grant universities. The analysis further connects the gendering of Palestinian voices to the adjunctification and disposability of contingent academic labor, showing how dissenting scholars are cast as surplus, waste, or reserve labor by neoliberal American universities. The chapter contends that the policing of ‘incivility’ in American academia reproduces settler colonial power by regulating speech, gender, and belonging under contemporary geopolitical pressures.

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