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Mizna News

May 29, 2026

Call for Submissions: Mizna 27.2, Ancestry/Indigeneity

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Mizna is opening submissions for its newest issue, seeking poetry, prose, and hybrid literary work that focuses on ancestry and indigeneity. Guest-edited by poet and scholar Umniya Najaer, this issue is interested in honoring Indigenous wisdoms in their many forms and giving space for writers and artists to explore their relationships to ancestry, inheritance, memory, spirit, land, flora, fauna, and the cultural practices that have grown from them. Amid mounting planetary brutalities, how do our ancestors speak across time? How do our experiences echo, extend, or depart from those of our ancestors? What freedom dreams have each of us inherited, and how do we live these dreams? What methods do we as writers, artists, and cultural stewards call upon to center Indigenous wisdoms and carry ancestral stories forward, whether they belong to direct kin, chosen kin, communal lineages, our deep species ancestors, or more-than-human kin?

We invite work that views ancestry and indigeneity not as static legacies, but as living practices of remembering, grieving, resisting, creating, and imagining otherwise. We are especially interested in work that attends to the intimate and collective forms through which ancestral knowledge ruptures, transforms, and survives—in kitchens, songs, ceremonies, gardens, garments, prayers, archives, dreams, rivers, ruins, and revolutionary movements. We welcome work that utilizes experimental methods to tell new stories about our ancestors, our obligations to the living, and our relationships to land, indigeneity, sovereignty, memory, and belonging.

This issue begins from the question of rootedness: What does it mean to belong to land, lineage, memory, and place across Southwest Asia and North Africa? Across the vast SWANA region, communities have long been bound to one another through overlapping histories of migration, trade, kinship, pilgrimage, agriculture, pastoralism, urban life, and shared ecological worlds. People have practiced nomadic, agrarian, and urban lifestyles; passed on ancestral wisdom and practices; endured, resisted, and adapted to invasion, conquest, empire, enslavement, displacement, and extraction. How have histories of successive empires, interferences, destructions of heritage and sacred sites, forcible removals of people groups, and slave trades altered lives and landscapes? How have modern nation states, colonial borders, Western colonialism, neoliberal militarism, capitalist extraction, and the expansionist settler colonial project of Israel—financed and justified by the United States—intensified the struggle over land, memory, and sovereignty? And how are these struggles further compounded by regional imperial and sub-imperial powers, including Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates, whose extractive investments, proxy wars, and militarized interventions in Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere have deepened contests over belonging, territory, resources, self-determination and collective survival?

More concretely, how do those of us whose homelands are under active economic and military siege create new cultural technologies for surviving the present? How do those of us violently separated from our ancestral homes keep Indigenous practices alive? How do those of us living in settler colonial states such as the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand support Indigenous struggles, land rematriation, sovereignty, and ecological repair? What solidarities, tensions, responsibilities, and contradictions emerge when our own freedom dreams unfold on lands whose Indigenous peoples continue to struggle for liberation? We welcome narratives from across the region that investigate and grapple with indigeneity and ancestry in a SWANA context while making connections with global Indigenous struggles.

Transregional SWANA beyond the cartographic genres of area studies

We’re interested in how and to what extent the term indigeneity maps onto the SWANA context. A SWANA framework that stops at the inherited borders of “the Middle East” risks reproducing the very colonial cartographies it is designed to unsettle. While SWANA conventionally names South West Asia and North Africa, the histories of indigeneity, land, water, sovereignty, and dispossession that animate the region cannot be understood apart from the Sahara-Sahel, the Nile Valley, the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the western Indian Ocean. For this reason, Mizna 27.2 embraces communities and geographies often placed outside the edges of SWANA, including South Sudan, Chad, Mali, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Pakistan, and India. These sites are constitutive zones through which transregional SWANA histories of mobility, empire, enslavement, ecological relation, and Indigenous world-making have unfolded.

We especially welcome work that attends to Black, Afro-descended, and Afro-Indigenous communities across the region, including Haratin, Tebu, Black Tunisian, Black Moroccan, Afro-Iraqi, Afro-Iranian, Zanj-descended, Sudanese, and other communities whose histories raise urgent questions about the relationship between indigeneity, Africanity, Arabization, enslavement, anti-Blackness, and caste. At the same time, we invite submissions from writers and artists working across the many Indigenous and ancestral transregional SWANA communities, including Amazigh, Assyrian, Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian, Nubian, Beja, Bedouin, Yazidi, Mandaean, Coptic, Marsh Arab, Ahwazi, Afar, Somali, Oromo, Tuareg, and other peoples whose histories unsettle the boundaries of the region itself.

About The Guest Editor

Umniya Najaer, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary poet, essayist and Black Studies scholar of Sudanese origin. She is serving as the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder for the 2025-26 academic year. Umniya’s writing is invested in activating the human ability to feel what each other feels. Her work is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization, brutality, and deathmaking.

Umniya’s recent publications include “Disarm Humanity: Meditations from the Third Decade of the Third Millenium,” “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children,” and “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Her poetry chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press as part of the First-Generation African Poets series. Her work has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Sacatar Institute, Stanford VPGE’s Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship, the African American History Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Advisory Council Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation in Africa Fellowship, among others.

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Call For Submissions: Mizna 27.2, Ancestry/Indigeneity