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Protean Magazine

Protean Magazine

An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

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  • Online Features
    • Critique & Essays
    • News Analysis
    • Poetry
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
    • Fiction
  • Store
    • Shop
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • Support Us
  • Submissions
  • About Us

Pink and blue gradient cover with title.

Beyond the End of the World: M.E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition

By: Madeline Lane-McKinley September 29, 2023September 29, 2023
Reviews

As one of the left’s most infamously provocative calls, family abolition is often mischaracterized. M.E. O’Brien’s “Family Abolition,” writes Madeline Lane-McKinley, is a corrective and definitive contribution, incisively tracing abolition’s possibilities and opening a view onto utopian horizons.

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Reviews
'Viale Antonio Gramsci in Naples' by Fenek (Mohamed Rouhani) - Exhibition 'Algeria, infinite land' up to March 26, 2018 at Castle of the Egg in Naples by Carlo Raso

On Poetry

By: Bahar Orang September 22, 2023September 29, 2023
Poetry

Poet Bahar Orang’s “On Poetry” is a lyric interrogation of poetry’s place in the class struggle, asking “Can poets own guns?” // “Can poets own property?”

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Poetry
Cover of Smoke and Ashes. A red poppy with title.

Opiate Imperialism: The U.S. Drug Industry, Past and Present

By: Sohel Sarkar September 15, 2023September 16, 2023
Reviews

Sohel Sarkar reviews Smoke and Ashes, by Amitav Ghosh. The historical opium trade not only echoes the current opioid crisis— enriched famous U.S. families and helped lay the foundations for global capitalism.

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Reviews

here, taste this

By: Kelly Mullins September 1, 2023September 1, 2023
Poetry

Amsterdam-based poet Kelly Mullins’s “here, taste this” is a love poem whose central conceit is the labor of cooking – an act against “the red bottle bourgeoisie” who “doesn’t know what it means to prepare a feast / from a pinch of salt & intuition alone”

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Poetry
The cover of Marx in the Anthropocene, by Kohei Saito. Green abstraction on a dark grey background.

Discovering a Green Marx: Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene

By: Ryan Moore August 21, 2023August 22, 2023
Reviews

Ryan Moore examines Kohei Saito’s environmentalist reading of Marx’s late notebooks in Marx in the Anthropocene—a major work in Marxist ecology and intervention in the degrowth debate.

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Reviews
The cover of Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj, text on camouflage background.

Combat Trauma [Excerpt]

By: Nadia Abu El-Haj August 15, 2023August 18, 2023
Critique & Essays

On the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul, we’re publishing the epilogue of Combat Trauma, by Nadia Abu El-Haj, out from Verso Books. El-Haj writes on the incalculable cost of the War on Terror—on this country’s jingoism, its willful ignorance, and its refusal to acknowledge its crimes.

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Critique & Essays

Newburyport, MA

By: Luke O'Neil July 31, 2023August 19, 2023
Fiction

From Issue IV: Luke O’Neil’s short story “Newburyport, MA” renders a memory in the timbre of modern experience, where diffuse horrors punctuate the everyday.

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Fiction
Hanging wall sculpture by Wallen Mapondera.

The Bishop at Peace

By: Zoé Samudzi July 29, 2023August 19, 2023
Critique & Essays

Zoé Samudzi reflects on the ambivalent figure of her great-uncle, the Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was briefly Prime Minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Despite his own best intentions, Muzorewa would be dismissed by posterity as a Black collaborator with a white apartheid government—though the truth is more nuanced.

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Critique & Essays

Review: On Zionist Literature, by Ghassan Kanafani

By: Dylan Saba July 18, 2023August 19, 2023
Reviews

Dylan Saba reviews Ghassan Kanafani’s “On Zionist Literature,” in which the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine founder deconstructs and critiques the literary myths and distortions that helped to craft the Zionist subject and deny Palestinian peoplehood.

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Reviews
A crowd at a concert.

Safer Spaces

By: Jon Ben-Menachem July 16, 2023August 19, 2023
Critique & Essays

Amid reflections on his time booking shows in NYC, Jon Ben-Menachem envisions new means of protecting communities in music venues and cultural events—and remaking a troubled industry.

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Critique & Essays

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PRINT EDITIONS

  • Protean Magazine Vol I, Issue IV: Special Relativity $14.99
  • Protean Magazine Vol I, Issue III: Breathing Room $11.99
  • Protean Magazine Vol I, Issue III: Breathing Room (PDF) $4.99
  • Protean Magazine Vol I, Issue II: Anti-Sisyphus (PDF) $4.99
  • Protean Magazine Vol I, Issue I: Pattern Machines (PDF) $4.99

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