 | |
| Vol. 24., No. 11 | December 23, 1998 |
| |
| Vol. 24., No. 11 | December 23, 1998 |
By Suzanne Trimel
Columbia University and Westview Press have formed a joint venture to launch a new quarterly journal on black urban culture, Souls, which will debut in January.
Under the editorial direction of Manning Marable, the Columbia history professor who is one of today's most widely-read black intellectuals, Souls will publish leading writers on African-American culture, politics and society, including Amiri Baraka, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia Williams and others. Focused on urban social and political issues, Souls will adhere to the scholarly rigors of an academic journal, although topics and articles will appeal to a wider readership, said Marable.
Sponsored by the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia, of which Marable is director, and published by Westview Press, Souls' contributors will bring together academy-based scholars of the contemporary black experience, and intellectuals and others-including feminists and labor and community activists-from the wider black community "to engage in a critical dialogue about contemporary problems and challenges facing black America today," Marable said.
Through commentary, reporting and analysis, the quarterly will raise hard, new questions about the meaning of race in American life, said Marable, while interpreting the new social, economic, cultural and global forces that are rapidly restructuring African-American communities.
Souls, whose title was inspired by W.E.B. DuBois's classic 1903 analysis of black American culture and politics, The Souls of Black Folk, will be a departure from the handful of academy-based journals focused on African-American culture and minority issues in that it will involve scholars and intellectuals who seek to substantially transform the society that perpetuates black inequality, said Marable.
Souls is unique in that it has commercial backing while similar journals on African-American issues are published through university presses. It will be sold by annual subscription of $35.
Each issue will include a mix of analysis, interviews, and book reviews and will explore a critical theme in an extended "symposium" section. The January issue is dedicated to Harlem with articles by Beverly Watkins on Harlem's crack epidemic; John Jackson on urban ethnography; Jesse Lemisch on the commercialization of black culture; Gerald Horne on reading Harlem, and David Suisman on women in black music and the transformation of black urban culture. Eric Foner, a Columbia historian and author of the newly published The Story of American Freedom, writes about the meaning of freedom in black history. Future issues of Souls will explore race and revolution in Cuba; South Africa after apartheid; blacks in Britain; black women in American society, and African-Americans and the prison-industrial complex. Future interviews with Assaata Shakur, John Hope Franklin and Amiri Baraka are planned.
"In creating a new forum for social and political commentary on race in contemporary America, we seek to bring brilliant scholarship to the widest possible audience and to foster public debate on one of the most important issues in American life," said Westview Editor Adina Popescu.
Souls' editorial advisory board members are Herbert Aptheker, Dennis Brutus, Johnnetta B. Cole, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, George Frederickson, Sonia Sanchez and Cornel West. Marable is the author of numerous books, including Black Liberation in Conservative America (1997) and Black Leadership: Ideology, Politics and Culture in African-American History (1998). He is a founding member of the Black Radical Congress, a new grass-roots political organization created to revitalize the black freedom movement.