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

Since modernism/modernity became established as a scholarly field of study in the English-speaking academia, both terms were grounds ‘filled with contestation’, to remember Malcolm Bradbury’s and James McFarlane’s 1976 seminal essay on the ‘name and nature’ of modernism. Some twenty years ago, in her ‘definitional excursions’ on the ‘meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism’ Susan Stanford Friedman also reminded us that ‘the oppositional meanings of modern/modernity/modernism point to the contradictory dialogic running through the historical and expressive formations of the phenomena to which the terms allude.’ The need to put our critical habits to the test remains just as pronounced in the wake of important turns in the field of critical thought and in the study of modernism in the English-speaking world. Stephen Ross’s recent volume on Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading (2022) is a case in point, as his concerns vis-à-vis scholarly paradigms from within the field of the new modernist studies in North America are also underpinned by the pressing concern about which ‘modernities’ and which ‘modernisms’ are studied and how they come to be understood and approached in relation to existing mappings and canons. This is why in Ross’s volume, Paul St Amour stresses the need to ‘enquire’ and challenge ‘the legacy of the inherited symbolic capital’ of certain modernities and certain modernisms through ‘diffractive readings” of a continually redefined modernist corpus and its legacies, as well as of the discourse of critique.

Because reading modernism is entwined with the travails of theory, critical praxis and pedagogies as well as with continuing divisions between more often than not uncontested origins and the ‘rest of the world’ (as is the case with Allana Lindgren’s and Stephen Ross’s 2015 The Modernist World), or between major and minor forms, this special issue thinks through a transcultural modernist corpus inclusive of but not limited to the modernist era, by engaging modernist practices as a malleable corpus that comprises different forms and media, temporalities, spaces, cultural narratives and experiences. The method that animates our approach stems from our shared belief that literature and the visual arts—understood not only as academic disciplines but also as ordinary practices—are inherently ‘transitive’ in so far as they provide us with the means to address the singularity of each context, and, more broadly, the material, social and political conditions in which art exists. The transitive boldly answers the need for ‘yet another ‘adjective’ reading’ that Stephen Ross posits at the opening of Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading (2022), even though the grammatical roots of transitivity, a complex phenomenon “best defined as a type of grammatical relationship encoding the distinctness of participants in a situation described by the clause” (Kibort 2008) largely exceeds the category of the adjectival. As Florent Coste argues in a recent manifesto billed as an intervention on the side of literary theory, attending to this definition of transitivity entails increased attention to the multiplicity of agents and relations of dependence that comes into play in the act of writing. As an affective, aesthetic, intellectual and ethical method of enquiry, transitivity enables the exploration of relations between discrepant or seemingly unrelated, uncharted or, conversely, well-established configurations of cultural, social, political histories; the proposed method invites attention to the emergence and development of cultural forms, attitudes, affects, concepts, while providing insights on discrete forms of experience, thought and practice across different media and forms of thought without an attendant aim to see them fit into yet another paradigm for a larger, encompassing frame or perspective.

The essays that will appear in this special issue explore transcontinental, transatlantic and transnational trajectories, across literature, the visual arts, radical cultures, and contemporary thought. Contributors attend to the particularity of each context, to conditions of production, as well as to the complex relations cultural objects art part of, in order to foreground imaginative, generative encounters and creative practices through relational forms of thought that allow us to foster paradigms of transitive imaginative transformation, and response/ability in the present.