Our November 6-12 submissions window, while open to fantastical and speculative fiction of all sorts, has a special-interest theme of “post-colonialism.”
What the heck does that actually mean?
Read as literally as possible: We are interested in stories that examine human lives and human societies following a period of colonization.
(In all fairness — this can and should include stories that take place during colonization, provided they provide a temporal sense of how the colonial period and process is changing/disrupting/transforming the lands and peoples in question.)
By using the term “post-colonialism,” we are acutely aware that we’re risking the invocation of a wide variety of cliches. The politics get strident. Nationalism gets virulent. Identity gets weaponized. People get otherized. The intellectualism gets esoteric, exclusive, disparaging and intolerant. Cliche makes things brittle, and brittle things break …
Because colonization affects both the colonized and the colonizing lands and peoples, we consider the field to be extremely broad.
Because human beings on both sides of the dynamic are as often subjects of the systems of colonization as they are enactors of it, the most successful submissions will show us this complexity. Human lives and societies are messy, contradictory, emotional, revelatory, deliberate, inadvertent, full of beauty and travail that echo through decades and centuries.
Show us.
