PROTOCOLS invites writerly and artistic submissions for its issue #5: Tikkun/Repair. The split title points to how Jewish discourses of cosmic, personal, and social rectification articulate with political and creative questions of material and symbolic reparation. While contemporary politics have largely focused writers and artists around ideologies and strategies of resistance, this issue shifts attention towards theorizing, elaborating, and imagining future creation and rehabilitation. And yet, at the same time, like Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” repair seems fundamentally turned towards the past.
Notions of tikkun and repair are hardly straightforward and both have their limits. The former can encompass both kabbalistic philosophy and progressive social justice copy. The latter may refer to the mending of textiles or to the restoring of relationships. And is tikkun always desirable? Can repair go wrong?
Relevant submissions might address:
Climate change, the anthropocene, and repairing the literal globe
The emergence and circulation of tikkun olam (“repair the world”) as a social justice ideology in North American Judaism
Natural decay and archaeological praxes of restoration
The kabbalistic discourse of tikkun and its relation to contemporary questions of gender and the body
The interface between Jews and material claims of restitution and reparation
Decolonization and questions of cultural repair and/or return
Please send detailed pitches for essays, criticism, and reviews that outline the context, argument, and relevance to the issue. Fiction and creative nonfiction up to 6000 words; short-shorts and linked shorts 500-1000 words. No line limits for poetry. Translations, hybrid or intergenre work, and simultaneous and multiple submissions accepted, as well as reprints of work that has only appeared in print.
We accept a range of art submissions including but not limited to textile, performance, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, digital, and other multi-media work.
Send all text submissions and questions to submissions@prtcls.com.
Send all art submissions to art@prtcls.com.
Deadline: March 15, 2019
This is a third-party call and the Jewish Art Salon does not necessarily agree with all its contents.
