In this essay from Protean’s third print issue, now online, Kimberly Bain reflects on grief and memory: on the still-resonating echoes of Emmett Till’s death and his mother’s cry, on Nina Simone, on Black mourning across historical time.
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Protean Magazine
The Disenchanted Earth: An Interview with Richard Seymour
Samuel McIlhagga interviews Richard Seymour, author of The Disenchanted Earth, on socialism and degrowth, the ecofascist threat, and envisioning a planetary, humanist “re-enchantment.”
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The Seven-Week Abortion
Brianna DiMonda shares creative nonfiction from the perspective of a narrator who has undergone a routine abortion—attesting to the fact that, discomfort notwithstanding, the procedure is an inestimably crucial right.
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The Road to Brighton Pier: Class, Caste, and the British Left
With an eye to Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Samuel McIlhagga writes on the class codes of British diction and the incestuous tangle of the U.K. elite, who preside over a hidebound power structure and decaying institutions.
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[Rant] Stop judging transdimensional entities for what’s between their legs
Riley Tao shares a humorous piece of speculative fiction on the workplace discrimination experienced by transdimensional entities on a distant universal plane.
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The Hindu Right’s Deniability Politics
Pranay Somayajula interrogates the insidious rhetorical tactics of far-right Hindutva ideologues like Indian PM Narendra Modi and the BJP and RSS, who tacitly sanction pogroms while staying at arm’s length from the violence.
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Doomsday Pantoum
Innas Tsuroiya’s “Doomsday Pantoum,” wields the 15th-century Malaysian poetic form against the man-made kingdom of wealth, warning: “If you did not give up the lands, golden stools, / we laboring mass would start fires: must let go.”
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Apple Rant
Poet Karlo Sevilla’s “Apple Rant” follows the circulation of apples from U.S. orchards to street vendors in the Philippines, exposing the commodity as a site of imperial history, cultural anxiety, and class struggle.
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Lost Dogs
Poet Sarpong-Osei Asamoah’s “Lost Dogs” is a prayer of revulsion, oscillating between the heavens and the sewers.
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“Post-Crisis, Still-Crisis:” New York City’s Violent Sweeps
Sam Russek interviewed Ramza, an encampment resident in New York City who has been subjected to repeated arrest and police harassment. Sweeps have worsened under Mayor Eric Adams’s punitive policies.
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