Dans les coulisses des revues en études africaines
Behind the Scenes of Journals in African Studies
Cahiers d’Études africaines
Veröffentlicht am Donnerstag, 26. Juni 2025
Zusammenfassung
Ce numéro thématique des Cahiers d’Études africaines souhaite interroger l’écriture et la publication académique au sein du régime éditorial scientifique des études africaines, aujourd’hui et par le passé. Réflexif et critique, mais sans être strictement introspectif, puisqu’il ne s’agit pas de s’intéresser uniquement au cas des Cahiers, ce numéro invite à prendre pour objet et terrain d’enquête l’édition scientifique en études africaines en privilégiant trois portes d’entrée : les textes, les individus, et les revues. Son ambition est d’investiguer la salle des machines de la fabrique éditoriale en études africaines en examinant ses mécanismes de fonctionnement et les enjeux qu’ils reflètent ou activent.
Inserat
Special issue coordinated by the editorial team of Cahiers d’Études africaines
Argument
French journals in humanities and social sciences in African studies are inevitably involved in the asymmetries that structure the globalized academic field and affect the scientific production of knowledge about the African worlds. While seeking to implement practices to compensate for these asymmetries, they also contribute to producing and perpetuating them, through their choices of topics, the perspectives adopted, the selection of authors, and the scientific and disciplinary standards applied (Veret 2023; Mills, Kitchen & Sidi-Hida 2024). In this respect, French journals in African studies are not very different from other area-based and non-area-based journals (Frath 2011), nor from English-language journals in the Global North (Cabral, Njinya-Mujinya & Habimugisha 1998; Zeleza 1997). Nevertheless, they occupy a unique position. On the one hand, they are less highly regarded than English-language journals in the globalized academic sphere, due to the dominance of English as a scientific medium and the greater openness of these journals to critical and engaged approaches to contemporary academic and epistemic injustices. On the other hand, they remain prestigious opportunities for researchers and academics whose main language of scientific writing is French. This is also due to the close but asymmetrical academic and scientific networks that have historically developed between France and the African countries it colonized, and the forms of dependence and extroversion that these networks maintain (Gueye 2001; Doquet & Broqua 2019; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021). French journals continue to be valued more highly than journals published in French-speaking Africa. The vast majority of the latter are under-resourced in terms of human, financial and technical resources, which affects their solidity and sustainability (Mills, Kitchen & Sidi-Hida 2024). More broadly, research published from the continent “remains invisible and marginalised” (ibid.) within contemporary academic geopolitics in general and in the field of African studies in particular.
Based on this broad overview of humanities and social science journals in African studies today, this special issue of Cahiers d’Études africaines seeks to examine academic writing and publishing within the scientific editorial system, both today and in the past. By scientific editorial system, we mean the established sub-space of the globalized system of knowledge production, in this case in the field of African studies. Reflexive and critical, but without being strictly introspective, since it is not solely concerned with the case of Cahiers, this special issue encourages future contributors to take scientific publishing in African studies as a subject and a field of investigation, focusing on three entry points: texts, individuals, and journals. Its ambition is to investigate the “engine room” of the African studies publishing by examining its operating mechanisms and the challenges they reflect or activate. Such mechanisms range from the most routine procedures of writing, reading, evaluation and editorial preparation to intentional strategies of engagement, placement and positioning that are both political and scientific. They also involve ways of managing the tension between scientific rigour on the one hand and the unequal distribution of academic resources on the other, where scientific normativity clashes with moral considerations, or even “anxiety” (Veret 2023). The analysis will necessarily incorporate the impact of differences in status, internal functioning, economic models and editorial projects of the journals under consideration on the editorial process, insofar as these are among the conditions that make it possible (or impossible) to produce and transform scientific writing and academic publishing. What, precisely, should be done once the variable asymmetries have been demonstrated, along with their roots in the structural mechanisms that determine them and in which journals are involved? At what scales, in what spaces, and through what mechanisms can we reduce asymmetries, enable translation, connect and circulate ideas, and empower the globalized logic of knowledge commodification that weighs so heavily? These questions, to which there will undoubtedly be a variety of answers, are in the sights of this critical issue.
The theme of this issue is influenced by the contemporary intellectual context calling for disclosure, or even the overcoming or reversal of what remains of the colonial asymmetry inherited within African studies (see in particular Copans 1990, 2010a; Mudimbe 1992; Dozon 2003; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021; Zeleza 2024). However, this issue invites future authors to break free from rigid dichotomies imposed on reality and from injunctive and prescriptive approaches. The aim here is to closely examine actual practices and what they reveal about the intertwining and negotiations involved in the production, validation and dissemination of knowledge about African worlds (Nyamnjoh 2004). This is why, beyond the diversity of approaches, disciplines and formats proposed, this issue encourages contributors to make theirs the tools of the historical sociology of knowledge, as a science of the science of the social world (here, African social worlds), studying the social conditions of the production of “truth-telling” (Canguilhem 1977) in African studies—and in this case, what we propose to call “truth-publishing.” To quote Bourdieu (1975), the scientific field is a space of struggle for the acquisition, recognition, if not monopoly, of scientific authority. Asymmetries in social capital and positions weigh heavily in these competitions for the production and circulation of intellectual or scientific goods such as articles, but also for access to the journals themselves, insofar as they are hierarchical spaces that confer greater or lesser value on the published article and, de facto, greater or lesser prestige on its author and the ideas put forward. Objectifying the editorial process through a historicized sociology and ethnography of writing, editing and publishing practices, does not therefore mean turning away from the structural determinants of the contemporary scientific editorial system, but rather addressing them from the angle of how they actually present themselves to individuals.
Several entry points may be favoured, either separately or in combination. The journal particularly encourages readers to consider three ways of studying the issues addressed:
1. Following the texts
The contributions to this issue will allow us to enter the “engine room” of journals, focusing on article submissions and the procedures and stages involved in their acceptance or rejection. The aim is to examine both the textual productions themselves and the entire editorial process that accompanies them until publication, its various actors and the standards applied to them (Veret 2023). By tracking article submissions from the continent, where “the publication rate tends to be lower than for other sources” (Veret 2023: 373), we can observe the application of criteria and parameters for the acceptability of scientific texts beyond their production context by their author. These criteria refer in particular to the subjects and themes considered relevant or irrelevant, the interpretative frameworks and conceptual structures used to develop these texts, the way in which they position themselves within the literature on a subject of study and in a specific discipline, and how they interact with it (Keim 2016). Studying texts and how they are taken in charge, in particular the practices of peer-reviewing and rewriting by the various parties involved, also offers a privileged insight into the norms of a legitimate scientific language which, without being entirely stabilized, involves practices of verbal hygiene, correction and metadiscourse (Veret 2004). Journals “consolidate regimes of normativity that set high entry requirements for joining legitimising scientific communities” (ibid.: 378) while simultaneously acting as “literacy brokers” (Lillis & Curry 2010) by working to bring texts up to the required standards. Following scientific texts thus makes it possible to explore the tensions between the prevailing principle of impartiality, which is embodied in particular in the single- or double-blind peer-reviewing system (backed by standardized evaluation forms), and editorial support practices (Bordier 2016). These practices are often based on moral considerations of reducing academic and epistemic injustices, intended to compensate for the linguistic, logical and disciplinary biases of scientific texts from intellectual spaces dominated in the international division of scientific labour. They may also be motivated by the requirement for journals to maintain their publication schedule, which may lead to the resubmission of scientific texts that were initially rejected.
2. Following the individuals
Another point of entry is the experience of the actors who are the cogs in the scientific machine: authors, editors, editorial board members, editors-in-chief, reviewers. It will take into account the diversity of their professional literacies, dispositions and professional habits, the constraints they face and their scope for action. This diversity depends on the positions of these different actors in the globalized field of knowledge produced on African worlds, in particular depending on whether they work in countries that are central to international research funding agencies or in “non-hegemonic” (Arvanitis 2011) or “peripheral” (Keim 2010) ones, i.e. dominated in the international division of scientific labour. How do researchers, particularly those based in African institutions, navigate the “publish or perish” logic that is decisive in their careers, the growing pressure to be visible in indexed journals and their varying knowledge of their internal workings? How do they perceive the reviews they receive, their experience of the back-and-forth process with journal editors and the long delays before publication, or even the refusals to publish that they encounter (Gosden 2001)? Why do they sometimes choose to publish in the journals of their universities or those of African research organisations, sometimes in journals from the Global North, and sometimes in online publications that are halfway between political engagement and academic rigour, seeking to emancipate themselves from the domination of the highly regulated editorial spaces of the Global North (The Conversation, Africa is Another Country, The Elephant, etc.)? What about the experience of publishing professionals, in this case production editors working for the journals, who are the “kingpins” and “invisible workers” (Waquet 2022) in charge of correspondence with authors and responsible for editorial processing? Their vocation to the profession (Rauzy 2018; C. Noûs-Aussi 2023) is being severely tested in a deteriorating working environment, which is particularly affecting the support given to texts and the time devoted to training in scientific writing. What experiences can editors-in-chief and editorial board members share, caught between a strong commitment to publishing and disseminating knowledge and tight schedules (Bordier 2016)—also considering that such editorial tasks may produce positions of authority and power struggles?
3. Following the journals
Following the example of texts at the crossroads of analysis and testimony on French journals in African studies and “ways of doing journals” (Copans 2010b, 2021; Bayart 2021), this issue calls for articles that offer a counterpoint to the analysis of French journals in African studies by focusing on African journals, both past and present, driven by a desire to produce knowledge in terms that differ from those dominant in the Global North, sometimes to completely renew epistemological frameworks, with the aim of “transforming Africa into a major place of its own writing” (Gueye 2005: 223). This was the project of a journal such as Afrika Zamani, created after independence by an elite group of African historians, with the ambition of participating in a rewriting of African history that would allow for intellectual autonomy and political affirmation (Ki Zerbo 1975; Mourre 2022). Many of these African journals targeted an African readership, advocating the establishment of an African paradigm of social sciences through leading African intellectual figures, “schools” (the Dakar school, the Dar es Salaam school, see Denon & Kuper 1970; Ranger 1971; Thioub 2002) and journals such as Présence africaine (Frioux-Salgas 2009), and calling for African and African languages to be treated as languages of science like any other (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986). However, they have been, and still are, confronted with systemic difficulties that were exacerbated by the structural adjustments of the 1980s: lack of support from States that are wary of their critical intellectuals, insufficient funding, lack of distribution networks and qualified personnel, particularly scientific publishing professionals (Mkandawire 1993; Olukoshi & Nyamnjoh 2006; Barro 2010; Hamdaoui 2024). Should they follow the scientific standards of the Global North and work to “compare themselves [...] to certain reputable journals published in Northern countries,” as proposed by the Dar es Salaam-based African Review (Makulilo & Henry 2024), particularly by prioritizing indexing, which appears as a “ticket to the very exclusive club, the very dandy aristocracy of scientific journals” (Ba 2024)? Or should they instead pursue an autonomous African publishing scene offering “an alternative to the frenzied race for the industrial production of articles, the imposition of a hegemonic language, or Western standards” (ibid.)? What exactly would an “Afrostructure” for scientific publishing consist of, and how could the “intelligent [...], collaborative, multilingual, sovereign (endogenous funding) [...]” mechanisms, on which such an “Afrostructure” would be based, be brought to life (ibid.)? The obstacles faced by editorial teams and publishing infrastructures based in Africa, ranging from working conditions to financial challenges, political struggles, and the challenge of establishing a new African episteme or paradigm in the social sciences, will be explored here.
A large variety of writing formats are welcome, from analysis to testimonials and feedback, including interviews and data papers that provide access to figures, materials and sources, as well as tables and maps that shed light on the inner workings of journals or the broader scientific and editorial landscape. Contributors will include publishing professionals and junior and senior researchers, as well as other stakeholders in the field of African studies publishing. The issue may also include analyses of non- Africanist journals, using a comparative approach, which will provide relevant insights for understanding the challenges addressed here. The case of area journals, some of which also focus on intellectual spaces dominated by the international division of scientific labour and resulting from colonialism, could in particular raise questions about whether or not journals in African studies have specific characteristics within contemporary academic geopolitics.
Submission guidelines
The deadline for submitting abstracts (maximum 500 words) written in English or French is set
for September 5, 2025, at midnight (GMT+1).
This special issue is coordinated by the editorial team of Cahiers d’Études africaines and proposals should be sent to cahiers-afr@ehess.fr. Authors will be notified if their proposals have been selected on September 15, 2025, and the deadline for submitting first versions of article is set for February 15, 2026.
Editor-in-chief
Marie-Aude Fouéré
Editors
Nadège Chabloz
Hortense Naas
Editorial team
- Pascale Barthélémy, Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, France
- Jean-Pierre Bat, CNRS, Paris, France
- Gaetano Ciarcia, CNRS, Paris, France
- Denis Cogneau, IRD, EHESS, Paris, France
- Anne Doquet, IRD, Paris, France
- Georges Macaire Eyenga, University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg, Afrique du Sud
- Sandra Fancello, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Augustin Jomier, INALCO, Paris, France
- Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Université Paris 8, Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France
- Maëline Le Lay, CNRS, Paris, France
- Marianne Lemaire, CNRS, Paris, France
- Catarina Madeira Santos, EHESS, Paris, France
- Uactissa Mandamule, Observatório do Meio Rural, Maputo, Mozambique
- Sakiko Nakao, Université Chuo, Tokyo
- Didier Nativel, Université Paris Diderot, France
- Fabienne Samson, IRD, Paris, France
- Abdoulaye Sounaye, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Allemagne
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Kategorien
- Vermittlung (Hauptkategorie)
- Gesellschaft > Soziologie > Arbeitssoziologie
- Gesellschaft > Ethnologie, Anthropologie > Sozialanthropologie
- Gesellschaft > Studien zur Wissenschaft > Soziologie der Wissenschaften
- Gesellschaft > Ethnologie, Anthropologie > Kulturanthropologie
- Gesellschaft > Ethnologie, Anthropologie > Politische Anthropologie
- Gesellschaft > Soziologie > Kultursoziologie
Daten
- Freitag, 05. September 2025
Anhänge
Verweis-URLs
Informationsquelle
- Hortense Naas
courriel : hortense [dot] naas [at] ehess [dot] fr
Lizenz
Diese Anzeige wird unter den Bedingungen der Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universell .
Zitierhinweise
« Dans les coulisses des revues en études africaines », Beitragsaufruf, Calenda, Veröffentlicht am Donnerstag, 26. Juni 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/147pq
