Forthcoming

(17. 2025) Deconstruction at Large

Special Issue Editors: Mina Karavanta and Apostolos Lampropoulos

Deconstruction at large is an attempt to rigorously engage the radical potentialities of "living together well in the present" and being-with other species, entities and terrans not only inside but also outside the order of the visible and of the discourses and aesthetics of settler colonialism. Among other things, it invokes the event of a world that looms beyond the foreclosing horizon of a globality and seeks to decolonize the human as a racialized and taxonomized being by developing a poetics and aesthetics of relation, exchange and reciprocity that dismantle and transgress the "invention of the other" (Derrida). This special issue examines the “at large” dimensions of deconstruction and attempts a rigorous reconstellation of Jacques Derrida’s philosophical and political essays with decolonial thinkers and artists in the long present.

 (18.2025) In the Shadow of Empire: Situating Black British Writing

Special Issue Editor: Joan Anim-Addo

Granting Black British writing – as a body of texts – the place it deserves in the British university system is the central concern that this Issue explores. Acknowledging the historical perspective of 400 years of contested writing, and drawing on the conference, ‘Situating Black British Writing’ (London, 2023), the Synthesis special  issue focuses on situating the field in relation to the Humanities, critical thought, a changing understanding of the signifier ‘Black’, and the impact of UK publishing politics on the corpus.

The special issue builds on pioneering research and teaching interests established on differing sides of the Atlantic. This includes the co-founding, teaching, and inaugurating of the UK’s/world’s first Black British Writing postgraduate programme, following on and interlinking with the teaching and researching of Caribbean and diaspora literatures. Similarly, dialogue with the writing produced in Africa centrally informs the corpus. That such intersections visible within Black British writing speak to both transglobal connections and complexities, helping to re-world and define the body of work and its wide-ranging transcultural influences, is also central to this issue. We showcase, especially, Black voices that still too often remain largely missing from the UK’s scholarly debate. We bring to the Issue researchers and Black British writers alike presenting varied approaches to a range of Black British writing genres.

(19. 2026) In the Event of Antigone: Crossings, Translations, Restagings

Special Issue Editor: Elena Tzelepis

This special issue of Synthesis seeks to open a space for a performative plurality of "Antigone" (as text, performance, tragic figure, and political trope) beyond the canonical frameworks of (post)colonial modernity and pertaining to contemporary conditions of precarity, inequality, militarism, neoliberal de-democratization, and the rise of authoritarian regimes and formations. It proposes to reflect on ways in which contemporary plural and counter-hegemonic restagings of the tragic, and Antigone in particular, critically engage with histories of domination and justice, and to interrogate unequal conditions of citizenship, affectivity, and belonging.

The papers written by distinguished scholars in the field explore how Antigone is activated not only in local and global theatrical stages but also in the social scenes of "foreignness," displacement, and (im)mobility in the contemporary world. They engage with different media, cultural texts, practices, performances, counternarratives and countermemories that go against the grain of normative frameworks of Eurocentrism and universalism, and generate transformative feminist, decolonial, antiracist, egalitarian, and radical democratic politics and aesthetics in our harrowing political times.

This special issue includes papers of a symposium that took place in the context of the research program "Antigones: Bodies of Resistance in the Contemporary World [Antisomata]" (https://antigones.gr/ funded by HFRI). The interdisciplinary research program explores what persists and what remains from Antigone's performative legacy at the present historical moment, drawing attention to ex-centric, migratory, decolonial, queer, and transformational restagings of the tragic.

 (20.2026) Transitive Modernities: Territories and Temporalities

Special Issue Editors: Anne Reynes-Delobel, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Andrea Kollnitz, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

Taking trans-European axes and routes as its point of departure, through the study of various cultural forms and spaces, this special issue will examine international and transnational trajectories across Europe, the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean and Africa. Re-turning to established as well as hitherto uncharted connections, this issue will explore transnational connections and dialogues in conjunction with a recent reflection on borders, migration, mobility, collective memory, essential to understanding our current moment. Focusing on the historical and temporal specificity as well as the particular, but diverse, locations and contexts of cultural encounters and circulations, this issue fosters a critical geo-history of transitive modernities across and beyond Europe.