The pre-order period for Issue V is now closed. Issue V will be available for purchase in early 2025.
PROTEAN MAGAZINE ISSUE V: CONTRA TEMPS
The present moment demands reckoning with genocide, hideous exploitation, and burgeoning fascism the world over. In this issue, we’ve selected work that interrogates the moral and political conjuncture extending beyond domestic boundaries and contemporary political squabbles. As a U.S.-based publication, we are obliged to locate ourselves in this configuration and escape the blinkered perspective that comes with living in the heart of the empire.
So, in our effort to look beyond our own political borders and boundaries, we’ll be furnishing perspectives from Gaza, first and foremost—as the genocide perpetrated by Israel necessarily looms large in any moral account-taking of the now. We’ve also collected astute analysis, affecting reflection, and works of uncompromising moral clarity that examine injustices and solidarities the world over: from Lebanon to Indonesia to former Yugoslavia, Italy, Brazil, and other elsewheres of all kinds.
All of the writing in this issue considers the present in the light of the past, through art and through history. In this lies the origins of our title theme: a contretemps is a disruption, an upset, a perturbation in the order of things. Taking some orthographic liberties with the word renders it dual: as, from one angle, a time for the reactionary—which, we must acknowledge, the present has been. We might alternately read it as an opposition to the temporal: our provocation. It stands for a refusal to give credence to false teleologies, the instrumentalization of history, and myth wielded as imperial cudgel.
Examining all of these notions and more are a wide selection of voices:
Special Feature
Above all, we are honored to print selected entries in the LETTERS FROM GAZA, a series of missives collected by the Institute for Palestine Studies and republished with their collaboration. These are the direct words of the people of Gaza in the midst of a genocide, in the face of grievous loss, often in despair. None can speak for them better than themselves.
Critique & Essays
ALBERTO TOSCANO writes on Zionism and anti-Zionism from the 20th century to now: the monopolization of genocide and the technicization of religio-historical myth. The renunciations of Italian thinkers Franco Fortini and Furio Jesi, which Toscano holds up to the light, possess a moral valence that still resonates as the genocidal settler project convulses in a protracted legitimacy crisis.
KATE WAGNER explores the art and life of Yugoslavian painter France Mihelič. From the vivid real to the vast surreal, Mihelič adopted death and decay as his own, interpreting war, folk tradition, family, and more through both light and shadow.
MARY TURFAH examines Israeli expansionism, the Blue Line with Lebanon, and the fantasy of security without settled borders against the backdrop of renewed revanchist calls by Israeli officials for the conquest of southern Lebanon.
SITA BALANI considers the ubiquity of metaphors of fire in the imagery and depiction of protest movements through recent books by Hannah Proctor and Vincent Bevins. From literary flourish to polemic, flame, as an ur-metaphor, is reliably irresistible—but Balani weighs what its appeal really signifies.
PRANAY SOMAYAJULA looks at the historical legacies and present-day relevance of Third Worldism, as embodied in Indonesian leader Sukarno and the 1955 Bandung Conference. The undoing of “Third-World” solidarities was a loss for the world, and we might do well to reinstate them.
Poetry
The poets in this issue, too, rail against imperial space-time. From Cuba to Palestine, from West Bank checkpoints to ICE concentration camps, their poems mangle the present state of things in the hopes that a livable future might emerge out of the rubble.
NOAH MAZER, “Liberal Poem for Palestine”
LENA TUFFAHA, “Garden Variety”
IBRAHIM NASRALLAH, “Palestinian”
WENDY TREVINO, “For Aaron Bushnell”
D. MUSA SPRINGER, “65 years, give or take”
DARIUS SIMPSON, “I ONCE STOPPED A HURRICANE BY TALKING TO THE WATER”
LOLA OLUFEMI, “Your Demise Precedes the World’s”
Art & Illustration
We’re delighted to feature the visual talents of numerous artists and designers in this issue. Our list of art contributors will be announced soon.
