History & Mission

Mission

There has never been a more crucial time to publish an open access, peer-reviewed journal of Black Study(ies). The need to reimagine and repurpose the scholarly journal has never been clearer. In its newest iteration, as the open access peer-reviewed chronicle of serious work in the long Black intellectual tradition, the journal hosts lively, rigorous, Black-full conversations across borders, on a purpose-built online platform hosted by IRAAS and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. The Souls platform features scholarly journal articles and reviews, as well as creative work, opinions, and 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 disciplines and genres, representing a range of creative and challenging interpretations of the key issues 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. These conversations span generations and remain 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 students and those emerging and forging new paths within and outside of academe.

History

Manning Marable came to Harlem in 1993 to build the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and founded an annual called Race and Reason, in the fall of 1994. It was a research reader in the lineage of Du Bois's Phylon and the old Atlanta University annuals— a once-a-year gathering of what IRAAS was thinking and doing that ran for four years. In January 1999, IRAAS reached for something far more ambitious — a quarterly: Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics and Culture. Cheryll Y. Greene, a veteran of book and magazine publishing, edited and managed it through those founding years.

When he joined the ancestors in 2011, this journal could have ended with its founder. Leith Mullings would not let it. She asked Barbara Ransby, who carried the journal forward, to the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which stewarded the journal for a full decade (2012 to 2022). She turned up the volume on a frequency that had been playing low, anchoring the journal in radical Black-feminist thought. She steadied it through the move with her first issue, the 2012 "Election Issue," then ran it through the Trayvon-to-Ferguson years and the rise of the Movement for Black Lives. Through all of it she kept Souls rigorous, lively, and unafraid.

Souls has always been a journal of Black study(ies) as intimacy and diasporic imagination — named in mourning, carried by women, gesturing past its own founding grammar toward full intramural Blackfullness.

DISPATCHES

Dispatches is where SOULS publishes work that will not wait. Essays and provocations, photographs and films, interviews, teaching notes, movement reflections, and writing from ‘inside’ — not peer-reviewed, but held to the same standard of seriousness as the research we publish alongside it. We take the name from Manning Marable's Dispatches from the Ebony Tower (2000), and push it forward with creative work, opinion, criticism, and multimedia from scholars, artists, activists, archivists, curators, and students.

Editorial Staff

Jafari Sinclaire Allen—Editor-in-Chief

Jaala Alston—Managing Editor

James Kitson—Senior Editor

Amy S. Barenboim—Editorial Assistant

Kaylon Simone Cannon—Editorial Assistant

Sam Davis—Editorial Assistant

Michael Henry Shavelle—Editorial Assistant, Social Media

Syuba Thurai—Editorial Assistant

Editorial Board

Zaheer Ali(Oral Historian, Educator)

Davarian Baldwin(Trinity College)

Samiya Bashir(Poet)

Lamarr Jurelle Bruce(U Maryland, College Park)

Tisa Bryant(Iowa)

Hugo ka Canham(U South Africa)

Derrais Carter(UMass, Boston)

Victoria Collis-Buthelezi(U Johannesburg)

João Costa Vargas(UC, Riverside)

Dana-Ain Davis(CUNY Graduate Center)

Novella Ford(New York Public Library)

Donette Francis(U Miami)

Zinga Fraser(Brooklyn College)

Steven Fullwood(Independent Archivist, Writer)

Nadege Green(Independent Archivist)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs(Independent Scholar, Writer)

Juliet Hooker(Brown)

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles(Northeastern)

Eleeza Kelley(Yale)

Marcus Lee(Princeton)

K’eguro Macharia(Independent Scholar, Writer)

Miranda Mims(Nomadic Archivists Project)

Premilla Nadasen(Barnard)

Osmundo Pinho(UF Recôncavo da Bahia)

Derecka Purnell(NYU)

Kevin Quashie(Brown)

Tiana Reid(York)

JT Roane(Rutgers)

Tanya Saunders(UMBC)

Azure Thompson(SUNY Downstate)

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley(UC Santa Barbara)

Michelle Wright(Emory)

Black Study(ies) at Columbia Faculty Editorial Board

Vanessa Agard-Jones(Souls Managing Editor, Emerita)

Edwidge Danticat

Nyle Fort

Racquel Gates

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Frank A. Guridy

Sarah Haley

Sharon Harris

Saidiya Hartman

Obery M. Hendricks

Kellie E. Jones

Natasha Lightfoot

Shawn Mendoza

Mignon R. Moore

Rachel Grace Newman

Robert G. O’Meally

Deborah Paredes

Shana Redmond

Sam Roberts

Kimberly Springer

Brandi Summers

Kendall Thomas

Ebonya Washington

Mabel O. Wilson