SOULS Journal Wordmark
A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
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Mission Statement

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 1999, inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ Phylon journal and Atlanta University’s series of annual research readers, Manning Marable founded Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. Cheryll Y. Greene originally edited and managed this quarterly interdisciplinary journal at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. For nearly twenty-five years, Souls has focused on “the critical examination of contemporary Black experience.”
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.