Africa Today

By the time this issue of the journal reaches you, we hope that the backdrops against which we lay out our aims for this new feature—the national and global response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the worldwide pandemic wrought by COVID 19—will have begun to make inroads in transforming centuries-old inequalities and injustices and that scientists across the globe will have produced vaccines, allowing us to reembrace our lives with new understanding of what is important.

In this worldwide moment of rethinking, the editorial team of Africa Today is reflecting on the nature and scope of the journal. Africa Today came to Indiana University in 1999, and since then it has continued contributing to scholarship on Africa by publishing peer-reviewed academic articles that have helped promote understanding of critical issues, processes, and challenges, as well as the dynamism, of the continent. To give the journal a dimension of immediacy and open it to more timely exchange, the editorial team is launching two new features, "In the Now" and "In Dialogue."

"In the Now" will create a platform for short scholarly viewpoints and commentaries on a wide range of topics that will be disseminated relatively quickly. It will welcome brief, timely submissions, typically between 1,500 and 2,500 words, on critical issues of the day, circumventing the lengthy internal and external review process. Given this format, which can embrace the interdisciplinarity of our field and journal, we invite original submissions that have been neither published nor submitted to another journal for consideration.

This new feature will supplement peer-reviewed scholarly articles that come to us through the regular submission process. In collaboration with our publisher, Indiana University Press, Africa Today will be able to designate it "open access," so as to facilitate circulation and engagement. Ultimately, we hope that this feature will open a space and spark conversations on the pages of the journal. It is our hope that subscribers and readers, especially Africa-based colleagues from the many corners of the continent, will find this platform useful and appealing.

We can review submissions to "In the Now" in English, French, or Portuguese, and, as with the journal as a whole, submissions will be published in English. When Africa Today goes to press, it will be authors' responsibility, [End Page vii] regardless of the language of composition, to forward their submissions in English and to assume related costs. At the same time, we welcome submissions in a range of other languages, accompanied by translations into English, French, or Portuguese for review purposes. Selected submissions will be published in English translation in the pages of Africa Today, with the submission in its original language on our ScholarWorks platform, an open-access repository for disseminating and preserving intellectual work, linked to Africa Today.

To launch "In the Now," Africa Today is asking new members of our recently expanded Editorial Advisory Board to write short commentaries that will appear in subsequent issues. We likewise invite readers to help initiate this feature by submitting scholarly viewpoints and commentaries.

In addition to inviting readers to inaugurate "In the Now," we are initiating a second new feature, "In Dialogue." For this series, we encourage readers to send short critical rejoinders of no more than 1,500 words that engage with the peer-reviewed, scholarly articles published in Africa Today. As with "In the Now," these rejoinders will be fast tracked. We are hopeful that colleagues on and beyond the continent will engage with one another in productive ways, supporting and challenging each other and opening new possibilities, as Paul Zeleza suggested some years ago regarding engagement between scholars on the continent and in the diasporas:

A compelling case can be made for joint research and publishing projects between African academics based on the continent, the contemporary African academic migrants or diaspora, and the academics from the historic African diaspora. There are enormous benefits to be [reaped] on both sides: the exchange of internally positioned knowledge with externally positioned knowledge can reveal the "blind spots" of each position and foster greater reflexivity and intellectual enlightenment.

(Zeleza 2007, 104)

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