SOULS Journal
A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
There has never been a more crucial time to publish an open access peer-reviewed journal of Black Study(ies).
In 1999, inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ Phylon journal and Atlanta University series of annual research readers; Manning Marable founded Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. This quarterly interdisciplinary journal of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University was originally edited and managed by Cheryll Y. Greene.
For nearly twenty-five years, Souls’ principal focus has been “the critical examination of contemporary Black experience.” In our newest iteration-- as the biannual open access peer- reviewed chronicle of serious work in the long Black intellectual tradition– the journal hosts lively, rigorous, Blackfull conversations across borders; on a purpose-built online platform hosted by IRAAS and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia. The Souls platform also features non-peer-reviewed multimedia content in its ‘Dispatches from the Ebony Tower’ section.
Souls seeks to publish the best imaginative, theoretical, and empirical Black Studies research, art, and political provocations-- across discipline and genre, and representing a range of creative and challenging interpretations of the key issues now confronted by Black studies scholars and by Black people throughout the world. The strategic objective of Souls remains the same: “to re- ground the field of African American Studies in the living legacy of DuBoisian social and political theory.” In the twenty-first century, this re-grounding follows Black feminist insistence on material/embodied and purposefully imaginative analysis; and methodological, creative, and theoretical innovation.
We are especially interested in staging conversations that model promiscuously transdisciplinary modes of inquiry and presentation. Against camps. Steeped in expertise and particularity. Authorized by the depth and seriousness of study and engagement. Across generations, and accountable to a Black intellectual tradition that reflects, engages, or challenges what Marable characterized as “descriptive, “corrective,” and “prescriptive” work.
Think of the Souls conversation as an anthology that includes, for example: wide-ranging scholarly review essays with commentary; visual art and music; long- and short-form research essays; creative writing; book discussions; critical reflections on teaching innovations and movement work; archival reprints and finding aids; interviews and oral histories. We publish seasoned scholars, artists, activists, archivists, and curators, alongside those emerging and forging new paths within and outside of academe.
PUBLICATION GUIDELINES
We want to publish your best work. And our editorial process will honor your voice.
Souls has room for your ruthless critique; crystalline historiography; relentless data-driven political-economic analysis; poetic expression; philosophical exegesis; airless erudition; rich instructive ethnography, critical music playlists, paradigm-shifting video/film; meticulous close reading, and imaginative lyrical theorization—all in the same offering, or works set alongside one another (as Toni Morrison insists we situate our stories). Show us how you and/or your conversation partners see this world and imagine other worlds—in visual art, sound, poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Dazzle us with archival finds, interviews, conference proceedings, and translations that few have seen or heard. Advocate new ways to teach, learn, sense, and organize. All these offerings “like bread in our children’s mouths... .”[i] Souls stages conversations that impel (re)action, movement, feeling, and invested thought, including and beyond the “academic.” So, yes— a “re-grounding” of Black Studies, as our original statement affirmed. Together. This Souls is a collective project. On this shore and across new terrains and seas. Imaginatively de-territorialized and at the same time keenly aware that one must ‘be’ somewhere: ‘stay’ somewhere, making demands and sometimes cultivating on rocky or toxic soils. Moving, as a luta continua.
PUBLICATION GUIDELINES
The Souls editorial office will be the first to receive the gift of your submitted work. Please be sure to compose your abstract in a way that will help us understand how the work contributes to the conversation and our wider project.
As ever, Souls is an intellectual intervention that seeks to inform and transform Black life and history. That is, while all beautifully told stories, fascinating unearthed facts, and well-wrought art are valuable and significant; when we receive your work, our editorial collective will ask, after Sylvia Wynter, what does this work (hope to) do?[ii] What is (are) the intervention(s)?
Your rich citational infrastructure and illuminating endnotes contribute to the conversational quality of Souls. The editorial office encourages this rigorous practice of gratitude, and encourages transparency about your methods, archives, and analytic approaches. We want you to ‘show your work’ as you add to the unbroken transgenerational conversation.
The editorial office is happy to receive submissions of works written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Haitian Kreyol, and other languages. We must ask that authors provide a fulsome abstract written in English and expect a longer time to review relative to works in English (until we reach multilingual capacity).
Each volume of Souls will feature a work originally written in a language other than English. We are interested in both foundational works that monolingual English readers may have “missed,” and reflections on the state of Black Study(ies) from those writing in languages other than English.
Submitted works undergo editorial office review and double-anonymized peer view, with the option of an open mentorship-review workshop process, initiated to develop the next generation of scholars and artists and to connect across generations, disciplines, and geographies. Special section proposals will likewise undergo an open mentorship-review workshop process, as well as expedited anonymous review by members of our Editorial Board. The editorial office aims to render a final decision on all reviews within ten weeks.
In the case of review essays and other works designated for commentary, the editorial office will commission interlocutors to expand the conversation, to which the author will be asked to respond.
The editorial office will sometimes determine that a submission is not for us. This may occur as soon as the work is submitted to the Souls office (desk pass) within ten days; or via the peer review process (pass). In all cases we will tell you why we have decided to pass and will make suggestions for other outlets or reconceptualization.
Please send your work, via email, directly to our editorial office, where it will be received with gratitude: [email protected]. We will respond immediately and begin the process.
DIVEST.
The theme of the 25th Anniversary Volume of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society is 'Divest.' This is, of course, occasioned by the case of Israel, and comparisons to South Africa/Apartheid and other historical movements to divest, which a multiracial coalition of students, at Columbia and throughout the world, have acutely returned to the center of public debate. Their demands of financial accountability, transparency, and divestment have, in turn; called into question, intensified, and in some cases upended historical and contemporary social-cultural and political-economic entanglements, solidarities, and investments.
Souls invites you to think with us— at once topically, in the present/real, and more capaciously, to envision the conceptual-political labor of divestment. The Black intellectual tradition out of which Souls emerged has called for this over many generations. For us, divestment is not merely a process of withdrawal. Accept this invitation from our storied, new journal, to engage a creative practice of inventing otherwise. In what, where, and in whom must we invest? We invite you to show us your best work. Study, write, make art, or critically appraise an important moment, object, issue, or event in your language-- stretching toward the multilingual, multi-genre, multimedia engagement to which we aspire.
Is divestment an abolitionist project? A Black feminist imperative? A chimera, fool’s errand, or trap? Show us. Think through whether (or which) Black folks hold enough "controlling shares" in anything to warrant the term "divestment," as opposed to mere dis-investment of small measures of social, cultural, or material capital. What does divestment look like from various global vantages? What are its connections to reparations discourse; or to boycotts and sanctions? Show us the historical and/or economic significance of the terms of divestment/disinvestment – such as "sell-off," "spin-off," "split-off," and "carve-out." Assay a declension of divest. We want to know, for example, how scholars, artists, advocates, and practitioners envision divestment from whiteness. And/or a divestiture of masculinity, or gender itself? Can the poor, or aspiring middle class really invest, or is this a bourgeois fiction? Push against assumptions and just-so narratives with new data and/or critical (re)examination.
Particularly germane to the work of reflecting 25-years of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society: what about dis-investment from notions of "rigor," objectivity, and/or disciplinarity? How does this relate to the DuBoisian tradition that Souls has exemplified in twenty-four volumes -and-counting? “Won’t you celebrate with (us)” (Lucille Clifton, 1993) the 25-year history of the journal-- inaugurating its expanded ambit online -- by joining the conversation? Our editors will be happy to receive your work or short proposal, after you have read our submission guidelines and mission statement.