Changes Everywhere You Look

This issue marks the start of African Art's fifty-seventh year of publication, and although it's not one of those nice, round numbers people like to celebrate as special anniversaries, it does mark a number of beginnings and changes. And anyway, this volume marks my own twentieth anniversary as executive editor of the journal, so it's round-number special to me—that's why I'm the one writing this First Word. Readers may decide for themselves whether this is a honor or a booby prize.First and foremost, we welcome the newest editorial board to join the African Arts consortium: University of Miami, Ohio. Its membership includes five editors from separate institutions in Ohio: Jordan Fenton at Miami University, Ohio; Matthew Rarey at Oberlin College, Sarah Van Beurden at Ohio State University; Kristen Windmuller-Luna at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and Joseph Underwood at Kent State University. All of them have been contributors to the journal as writers and reviewers in the past, and we are happy to welcome them as editors now, bringing new approaches and points of view to the consortium's decision-making.In addition, the UCLA board welcomes Silvia Forni, the new Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum and Carlee Forbes, Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Fowler. And after losing our editorial assistant Wesleigh Gates to a well-deserved fellowship this summer (the pitfalls of hiring student assistants), we welcome Alexis Rae Coopersmith, a PhD candidate in UCLA's Sociology Department specializing in East African studies, as our new editorial assistant. Alexis is a former book review editor at UCLA's African Studies graduate student journal, Ufahamu.The first Ohio-led issue will be Summer 2024 (vol. 57, no. 2), with a combination of general submissions and commissioned pieces. Ohio is taking over from the Rhodes University board, which unfortunately was unable to get funding to continue to participate in the consortium. It is a sad fact of current academic publishing that, without robust financial support from universities and other scholarly institutions, it is impossible to create and distribute publications, especially high-quality print journals like African Arts. Those of us who do the behind- the-scenes work of managing peer review, copy-editing, doing layout, proof-reading, etc., without an academic appointment do still need to feed ourselves and keep roofs over our heads—a notion that sometimes appears to be utterly alien to the administrative hive mind. The adoption of the consortium model in 2016 allowed this journal to continue publishing for nearly six decades by spreading the financial burden across multiple institutions so that, if one must withdraw from the consortium, the journal as a whole can recruit new participants and stagger ever onward.When we initated the consortium, we hoped that having one board wholly based in the global South would help increase participation from Africa-based scholars. The Rhodes board certainly delivered. Ruth Simbao spearheaded a program, funded by the Mellon Foundation, that both ran workshops to help African authors work on fine-tuning their scholarly writing and also provided a place in these pages to publish the final product. The number of African writers appearing in the journal greatly increased during the Rhodes board's time, and we hope that more and more African art historians will continue to submit their research here.However, since we will no longer have that dedicated Rhodes issue, we plan to incorporate more African editorial participation by recruiting individual African scholars to participate in the different (American-based) consortium boards and to make sure there is substantial African representation in the peer-review process. We also remind all our readers, African-based or no, that the journal is always open to proposals for special issues. (We do try to run no more than two special issues per volume, to balance publication of commissioned and general submissions.) We are furthermore open to proposals for special sections—two or three linked articles to go through peer review and be published in the same issue.Another change you may have noticed over the last few issues is that we've finally found a font that can handle all of the diacritical marks used in African languages! It is an open-source Google font called Noto —we're the using Noto Sans and Noto Serif versions. It bills itself as “a typeface for the world,” supporting everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to, shall we say, Yorùbà (see https://fonts.google.com/noto if you'd like to explore/use it yourself). For decades, this journal has been constrained in the diacritics it could comfortably print, and most of time we've had to jury-rig the ones we could manage by stealing glyphs from multiple fonts and jamming them together on the page.Now that we have this (dia)critical capacity, we encourage authors to use the appropriate glyphs in their submissions. However, we're not going to force you. Our policy going forward is that diacritics are the author's call, and authors will be responsible for checking that the appropriate glyphs have made it onto the page when we send you your galleys.And finally, a change that will not necessarily be visible in the pages of the journal per se, but which we hope will have an enormous impact behind the scenes. Over the fifty-seven years this journal has been in publication, the submission and review process has been managed, basically, through a series of lists. They've been shoved in manila folders or dumped in computer folders. Sometimes they've been hand-written in steno notepads. Sometimes they've been Excel spreadsheets. During my time here, I have vainly attempted to win my office colleagues over to the dark side of Access databases. This summer, when I temporarily took over managing peer review in addition to all my other tasks, I realized that we were using close to a dozen different software programs and/or cloud accounts to process and review submissions. It was a ridiculous waste of time involving copying and pasting from one screen to another to another to another, things got misplaced, and we were prone to dangerous gaps in communication. In attending journal-editor sessions at the Association of University Presses conferences over the years, it didn't seem that anyone else was doing anything radically different, beyond their note-taking software of choice.Over the years I've investigated proprietary manuscript management systems for academic journals. By and large what was available was geared toward large (ususally scientific) journals that get hundreds if not thousands of submissions per year, and the systems were priced accordingly. The last time I looked (in 2021) there were a couple of new systems coming online that were managable and affordable for small journals like African Arts, but they were still relatively untested and I didn't want to risk them.By the time you read this First Word, African Arts will be using the Open Journals System developed by Public Knowledge Products at Simon Fraser University in Canada to process and manage our manuscript submissions and peer review. (I'm a little nervous announcing this here because, as of this writing and given the wonders of publishing lead time, we've signed the contract but haven't actually set up the system yet.) From the point of view of authors and reviewers, this means there will be one site where you can submit papers, be invited to review papers, and see your reviews and publication decisions and all other editorial communications. It will also make it much easier for the editorial office to keep track of things, to see where papers are in the process, to remind people that they owe us a review or revision, Once you have created an account in the system, you can get into the system (as long as you remember your password)! No more expiring Box access! No more “I'm not a UCLA employee, how do I get in here?” We believe this will make the whole process of publishing with African Arts more efficient and user-friendly for everyone. The best kind of change.

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