Call for Submissions: "Resistance and Hope" Special Issue
We are so pleased to announce this year's Special Issue: Resistance and Hope, guest-edited by Bahar Orang! See the call for submissions below.
When we talk and write about Palestine in the West, what do we mean when we say ‘resistance’? As cultural workers of the first world, too often we slip into slotting the full range of creative production into the category of resistance. Any project that wants (simply wants) the genocide to stop becomes “resistance.” At a recent book launch in Toronto about a book on Palestine, the moderator asked the writer to speak on resistance, and she spoke loosely about writing as resistance, theory as resistance, teaching as resistance. While such refrains are seductive because they allow us to affirm life in unbearable conditions, it is worth asking: what happens when every political gesture qualifies as resistance? In what ways does this collapsing evacuate resistance of its strategic specificity and materially transformative aims?
My hope for this special issue is to co-produce a creative folio of political education that consolidates ‘Resistance’ as armed resistance against US-led imperialism. The question is not simply what counts as resistance, but what distinguishes symbolic performances of solidarity from cultural and intellectual work capable of politically defending liberation struggles? Not all gestures of solidarity intervene equally in the conditions of struggle. Every time there was the zionist demand to ‘condemn’ this group or that group there was an admission: armed resistance must be criminalized, censored, shamed, and stripped of political legitimacy. Armed resistance clarifies the limits of purely symbolic accounts of struggle because it forces us to confront liberation not as an abstract relation of domination, but as a material relation of violence and force. To affirm revolutionary violence, then, is a historically accurate, materially grounded, and ethically sound position to hold.
In an interview with Ebb Magazine, Palestinian writer and intellectual Abdeljawad Omar explained, “resistance is and always was a hopeful pathology.” Any reductionist, dismissive, or nightmarish view of armed resistance is, to Omar, anti-intellectual and ultimately invested in the status quo. The hopeful recourse is to take resistance as an institution that, while imperfect, cracks open the horizons of political possibility. Let us, as artists and writers, reckon with those horizons that resistance reveals, not only politically, but psychologically, ethically, conceptually, and aesthetically.
Such a reckoning could take the form of poetry, essays, short fiction, hybrid work, reviews of revolutionary literature or cinema, creative engagements with resistance speeches, political manifestos and prison writing, or creative responses to historical and contemporary anti-colonial resistance movements.
Send work in all our regular categories to [email protected].
Deadline: August 7, 2026
Submission Guidelines: Refer to our regular submission guidelines here.
Guest Editor: Bahar Orang
Bahar Orang is a writer and psychiatrist living in Toronto. She is the author of Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty. Her second collection, Grief Theory: Notes and Poems, is forthcoming in 2027.
