Loading...
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.
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 send your work, via email, directly to our editorial office (souls@columbia.edu), where it will be received with gratitude. We will respond immediately and begin the process.
Email us at souls@columbia.edu for any clarification. Our editors will be happy to receive your work or short proposal, after you have read our submission guidelines (detailed below) and mission statement.
Deadline for Submissions: Monday, January 6, 2025, at 11:59 PM PT.
The theme of the 25th Anniversary Volume of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society is 'Divest/Invest.' 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 and solidarities. For Souls, this presents an opportunity to re-inaugurate our twenty-five-year project, at once in its tradition, and responsive to the current conjuncture.
Souls asks, just as pointedly as a divestment demand: where, and in what/whom must we invest? After all, the Black intellectual tradition out of which Souls emerges has called, over many generations, for a knowledge-based Black freedom project that is not merely reactive, but proactive. We invite you to think with us—at once topically, in the present/real, and more capaciously, to envision the conceptual-political labor of both divestment and investment. Accept this invitation to engage a creative practice of inventing otherwise.
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. This is a community conversation. We invite students, scholars, artists, archivists, organizers, and many others as conversation partners. 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," or account for Black investments of social, cultural, or material capital—showing us the historical, political-economic, or ethical significance. What does this look like from various global vantages?
And what are the costs? Elucidate the connections to anti-trans violence and anti-Blackness; reparations discourse; or to boycotts and sanctions, for example. Play with the etymology—rooted in devistir—by showing a concept or theme, research respondent, or text “undressed,” or trace how investments serve as a covering.
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? Does gender transition constitute an investment or disinvestment? Can the poor, or aspiring middle class really invest, or is this a bourgeois fiction? How are you witnessing these connections play out where you are? What array of bodies, practices, politics, and habits of mind are present on the ground? Push against assumptions and just-so narratives with new data, praxis, poiesis, 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 academic language, “accessible” language, or notions of "rigor," objectivity, and/or disciplinarity? How does this relate to our investment in the DuBoisian tradition that Souls has exemplified in twenty-four volumes and counting? What, for example, are our intellectual and ethical standards regarding what can be said and what effectively “cannot be said” in the current moment? “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?
