Ki is an online journal overseen by the Editorial Board of Qui Parle that seeks to explore the “whatness” of the critical. We aim to publish work that is critical in the most expansive sense of the word: sharp, brief, politically oriented pieces that fall outside or trouble the bounds of scholarship and its conventions. We are interested in experimental academic writing, autotheory, lyric essays, poetry, multimedia works, and any number of things we haven’t thought of. Above all, submissions should be thoughtful and challenging. For a sense of the kind of experimental work we are looking for, we encourage you to read through Issues 1 and 2 of Ki and the “Breath” dossier published in Volume 30 Issue 1 of Qui Parle.
Please note that, while we celebrate creative work in all its infinite forms, we are unlikely to publish pieces that adhere strictly to genre conventions (e.g. fiction and poetry that does not engage critical, political, or theoretical thought and practice).
Submissions for Issue 3 will open on April 1st.
For Issue 3, we are thinking about sound and silence. Sound could be taken in the literal sense, as auditory sensory input, soundscapes, sound art—it could also mean the sound of drones, auditory weaponry and sonic-psychological warfare. On the other hand, sound and silence implies dissent, the eruption and censure of the protest or the riot. We are especially excited to welcome submissions that engage this conceptual territory, loosely defined.
A far from comprehensive list of possibilities: soundness, sounding out, sounding off, having a voice and hearing voices (cf. Moten and Harney), sounding like, resonance, dissonance, dissent, silence, silencing, awkward silence, noises, musical genres and their relationship to writing (eg. punk and zines), not-language, negation, auditory excrescence.
This issue would especially welcome multimedia work that makes use of our online format, e.g. animated work, soundscapes, ambient sound art, and noise poetry, notation systems, scores, and translation/transposition.
Submission Guidelines
Prose submissions—fiction, nonfiction, reviews, etc.—should be 1,500 words or less. If you have citational material, this will not factor into the word count. Please send only one prose submission at a time.
Poetry submissions should comprise no more than 5 poems in a single document. We encourage sending a .pdf in order to preserve formatting.
For visual media, please send up to 5 images. For audio, use .mp3, .mp4, or .wav. For audiovisual/interactive media, feel free to send a link. All audio, visual, and audiovisual media should include an artist statement and alt text.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome; please notify us should any work submitted be accepted for publication elsewhere. Questions should be directed to Be Schierenberg (bereniceschierenberg@berkeley.edu) or Naima Karczmar (naima_karczmar@berkeley.edu).