Protean Magazine

Scholar, author, and activist Tony Platt reviews the new narrative history by Miriam Pawel, "California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California."

Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish's "Mawwal" confronts immeasurable grief with unbending steadfastness: "the stabs of daggers I prefer / to being ruled by the vile."

Today we are honored to publish two short excerpts from the forthcoming translation of Palestinian revolutionary and writer Ghassan Kanafani’s "Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968," alongside a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Da…

Andrew Holter interviewed Tom Overton, author of a new biography, “John Berger: From Life,” out from Verso Books.

Kyle Carrero Lopez's poem "Itinerary" ambles across psychic shorelines, exploring the ways in which capitalism structures the family-form.

In "art from the artist," poet Paul Ukrainets meditates on the work of poetry and the limits of the poetic imagination: "That sacred dream I learned as / worth wanting: to peddle images."

In "Making Trouble at the Airport "A.R.

Poet and collage artist Jamila Osman's "Season of Migration" chronicles the global system of imperial violence that lurks beneath the postcolonial tourist economy.

Poet Isaac Pickell's "If I Had $1000000" imagines post-revolutionary intimacy that lasts "until you forget there ever was / a nightmare named gender // or a tortureporn called poverty."

In "Parable of the Modern Day Hijrah," poet Isra Hassan reflects on the fraught meanings of pilgrimage in contemporary Islam.

In "The Enemies of 1776", Dylan Saba traces the long history of the US's genocidal wars and pacification operations in the global frontier—from the Indian Wars, to the War in Vietnam, to the Israeli-US genocide in Gaza.

In "Pantone® Colour of the Year: A Consumer Review," poet Momtaza Mehri meditates on greenness as a volatile signifier of ecological collapse, neocolonial violence, and commodity circulation.

Poet Jon Hoel's "In a Generous Way" navigates grief through the history of Spanish fascism: "I return to my past again," he writes, "a gibbon / in the maw of loss."