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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.
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. 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 transparency about your methods, archives, and analytic approaches. We want you to ‘show your work’ as you add to the unbroken transgenerational conversation. Consequently, please submit endnotes and footnotes for your submission.
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.
All submitted works undergo editorial office review and peer review, 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 which the author will be asked to respond before publication of the edited conversation.
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 register for our online portal at https://ojs.soulsjournal.org/ and submit your manuscript there.
Email us at souls@columbia.edu for any clarification. We are happy to receive your submissions via our editorial portal at https://ojs.soulsjournal.org/. Please email us if you are having trouble registering.
Call For Papers coming shortly.
