***Note to Authors: please make sure your contact address information is clearly visible on the outside of all packages you are sending to Editors.***
REFEREEING GUIDELINES AND EDITORIAL NOTES
Please read these notes carefully. They deal with legal and other matters.
Critical Arts has niched itself in terms of conceptual freshness, textured writing, and experiential analysis which draws readers into its articles, its narrative themes and its theoretical explorations. Articles published in Critical Arts are universal in reach while retaining a particularity of context, specificity of content and relevance of topic. We invite articles which have the potential to influence the ways in which disciplines represented by cultural and media studies think about themselves in terms of critical dialogues generated within the South-North relationship, with special reference to Africa. How do people, institutions and constituencies cope within, resist and engage this relational nexus?
Critical Arts prides itself in publishing original, readable, and theoretically cutting edge articles. Many articles first published in the Journal have been subsequently reprinted with acknowledgement elsewhere. We are proud of this republishing record, which includes original articles first published in Critical Arts by, eg., JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and later, Stuart Hall, David Kerr, Ntongela Masilela, and Handel Kashope Wright, amongst many others.
Critical Arts is:
i) Is subscribed to by over 13 000 university and other libraries in South Africa, Africa, the USA and Europe via Routledge and UNISA Press;
ii) It is available online via Routledge. 1980-1992 back copies are available at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/
iii) Critical Arts has been published by UNISA Press since 2005, and from 2007 an international edition is published by Routledge. Routledge took over the electronic subscriptions managed by EBSCO, Gale, SABINET and AJOL as from January 2007.
Critical Arts has been publishing since 1980. A number of integrated theoretical trajectories and ongoing debates have emerged during the intervening period. Submitting authors are requested to familiarise themselves with these themes. For example, Critical Arts prefers analyses which interrogate essentialist ideas rather than simply assuming them. We prefer it if current authors address and critically engage discussions previously published in the Journal, in their own analyses.
Critical Arts publishes the work of established scholars and is also geared to opening spaces for new, young and dynamic authors, whose emerging work is of critical and theoretical significance. Amongst our authors (and in the book series) are MA and Ph.D. students whose work is often theoretically refreshing, conceptually innovative and critically challenging. Critical Arts provides a platform for such students who need to find their niche within the research and publishing community.
Critical Arts receives many submissions which are inappropriate to its preferred interpretation of cultural and media studies within the South-North axis (e.g. orthodox journalism and communication studies and studies which assume the notion of `mass' communication). Where appropriate the Editor-in-Chief will reroute such submissions to more paradigmatically appropriate publications. We hope that this facilitation by us will help such authors' to get some experience in this regard and obtain eventual publication in a journal better suited to such submissions. (Critical Arts however takes no responsibility for outcomes or negotiations relating to rerouted articles. This is simply a courtesy on our part).
All articles submitted to Critical Arts are refereed. This includes guest edited theme issues.
About 80% of articles submitted to, and refereed by Critical Arts, require minor to major revisions. We request that our referees and editorial consultants write helpful, anonymous reports, which can be sent on directly to our authors to assist them in revision in Critical Arts or for submission elsewhere if not appropriate for Critical Arts. The referee reports will indicate whether or not a paper is publishable, and the editors will then, where necessary, work further with authors on conceptualisation, any additional modifications and on other issues which may need addressing. This may require revisions -- conceptual, stylistic, factual -- over and above those initially identified by the referees. Authors thus need to be prepared and available to engage in such extra liaison and remain in touch with the journal's editors throughout the production process. (Papers accepted from authors who have disappeared or failed to sign the publishing contact will be pulled.) We ask authors to help us to ensure timeous publication by fulfilling their own responsibilities in this partnership. Our objective is to ensure the best possible outcome, articles which have a potentially high international impact.
Author Details
The Routledge/Taylor & Francis internet site CATS (Central Article Tracking System) logs and track the journal manuscripts. The following information is ideally needed for each contributor.
Submissions submitted by e-mail or hard copy lacking this information will not be processed.
Submission Guidelines:
a) Submissions should be original works not simultaneously submitted elsewhere.
b) Papers of up to 6000 words, including references and end notes will be considered.
c) UK English spelling must be used should your article be accepted. Provide an Abstract of about 200 words and a list of Keywords
e) Electronic copies should be submitted in Word compatible formats. Please note that we cannot process Mac formats.
f) Please place title, name, contact details and acknowledgements on the cover page. On the second page put only the title of the paper. This is to ensure blind refereeing.
g) Submission to, and acceptance by, Critical Arts implies that the journal has an exclusive right to publish the article, in both printed and electronic form. We cannot consider articles being considered for publication elsewhere.
h) Critical Arts is not able to offer prior comment on unsolicited manuscripts, especially dissertations which are sometimes sent us. If writers want to publish from their dissertations, then they must distil the article from the larger study themselves, and submit in terms of the required work length, theme and so on. We will respond to articles which are formally submitted for consideration.
i) Authors whose work is accepted will be required to sign a contract with the journal.
j) Referencing should be done according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Detailed examples can be found in the Notes to Contributors (back cover) of volumes 19 (2005) onwards, or on:
In text:
Book (Chambers 1983, 110-112)
Organisation as author (UNDP 2003, 14)
Reference list:
Bhabha H. and G. Viswananthan. 2002. Border crossings in education.
Cultural Critique 35 (2):34-48.
Chambers, R. ed. 1983. Rural development: Putting the last first. London: Longman.
Ezedu, H. 2001. Cross-cultural learning. In Co-operation in African Education, ed. S. Dlamini,
134-138. Pretoria: UNISA Press.
When refereeing submissions, apart from conceptual coherence, logical argument, adequate empirical substantiation, etc., our editorial board and referees are asked to address the following:
a) Is the article adequately referenced? Are the references accurate?
b) If submission is not initially in the Chicago referencing style we will evaluate the paper anyway, and we'll ask for a resubmission in Chicago if the article is accepted.
c) Critical Arts sometimes is sent unmodified conference papers for publication as main research articles. Critical Arts does not publish conference papers, but it does publish commentary, debates and extended book reviews. We will also consider conference papers which have been obviously revised for publication.
d) All submissions are required to be submitted with short abstracts and five or six key words. Does the abstract accurately reflect the substance of the article? Is the abstract suitable for inclusion in an index?
e) Critical Arts is sometimes sent articles which have been previously published elsewhere with a request that particular articles be considered for republication in specific theme issues. This status does not itself automatically merit reprinting in Critical Arts. (Sometimes a theme issue is well served by republishing such an article.) We have sometimes found bibliographic and other errors in such publications, not to mention conceptual and other difficulties which may require revision and updating. To safeguard both the authors and Critical Arts' interests, such submissions (if considered by the Editor) will be automatically sent on to our consultants and referees for evaluation.
f) Paragraphs or sentences which start with the name of a source are discouraged. Critical Arts' preference is that the sources be placed in brackets at the end of sentences, thus foregrounding the author's argument over the name of the source, who is then referenced in the normal Chicago style. We believe that restructuring sentences thus makes for easier reading as it is the argument which is emphasised.
g) For further information on Critical Arts' achievements and scope of interest, including a bibliography since 1980, please consult Denzin, N. ed. 2000. Cultural Studies: A Research Annual. Offprints are available from the journal. Please e-mail: tomasell@ukzn.ac.za or criticalarts@ukzn.ac.za
h) PLEASE READ THE ABOVE GUIDELINES AND KEEP THEM HANDY. Accepted submissions which do not adhere to them (especially with regard to referencing) will not be published until the author has done the corrections. If you move abode please keep in touch with us so that you can correct the galleys and answer any queries raised during typesetting. Authors who fail to internalise the above guidelines often delay publication, and they are also ironically the ones who complain the loudest when this happens. Please help us to keep the journal appearing on time by adhering to the basic procedures listed above.
i) The reviewing process can take anything between a month and much longer. The international norm is four to six months. We ask our referees for reports within a month of being sent them, but often reviewers are slow to respond for all sorts of reasons. Please be patient during this process.
j) Page charges are applicable. These are calculated for 2008 at R180 per page. Please ensure that your Research Office is notified that it will receive an account from us.
k) For South African-based authors only: Critical Arts is accredited with the South African Department of Education.
Keyan Tomaselli
Editor-in-Chief
Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural Studies
c/o Culture, Communication and Media Studies
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041, South Africa
(Ph) +27 (0)31 2602505
(Fax) +27 (0)31 2601519
Copyright
It is a condition of publication that authors assign copyright or license the publication rights in their articles, including abstracts, to Taylor & Francis. This enables us to ensure full copyright protection and to disseminate the article, and of course the Journal, to the widest possible readership in print and electronic formats as appropriate. Authors retain many rights under the Taylor & Francis rights policies, which can be found at
www.informaworld.com/authors_journals_copyright_position. Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyright material from other sources.
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