postamble: News

Why sign up as a postamble site user?

With the postamble website beginning to take shape, so dawns the task of inviting our readership to a further engagement with the journal and its editors. The new site has a number of key functionalities, which were designed to create alternative spaces for intellectual engagement by editors, authors and readers alike.

There are a number of benefits to signing up as a user of the postamble website. A user is allowed access to comment on the blog. Users will also receive correspondence from the journal's editorial collective. This will include advertisements of internships and other editorial opporunities; call for submissions distributions; as well as news about the postamble's institutional home, the University of Cape Town's Centre for African Studies.

Blogging can be a particularly useful forum for the production and dissemination of more subjective intellectual responses to issues, which do not adhere to the conventions of the academy. It can also invite critique and response from a global audience - something that is not possible in the seminar room, or lecture hall.

The editorial collective of postamble therefore invite our readership to sign up as users and to engage in the new forum that the website has created.

For those who are able to demonstrate a sustained and critical engagement through the blog, the status of blogger may be granted. This will allow a user to begin discussions on any number of issues and concerns that are of relevance to the culture, thought, politics, and social life of the African continent and its Diaspora.

New space of intellectual engagement for postamble

As a long-time editor of postamble, and the current managing editor, publishing the work of graduate students who are thinking Africa differently has been an important exercise in getting to grips with the notion of knowledge production in Africa.

What does it mean to write about, but also, publish studies of the continent that transcend the dominant modes of thought and praxis that have characterised representations of Africa for so long? Are we doing anything novel (or revolutionary) in creating a space for students to present their ideas in a quasi-scholarly forum such as postamble? Should questions of accreditation and the formalities of academic presentation be at the fore of our agendas as editors? Or should the journal itself be seen more as a liminal intellectual space of engagement - not quite a journal in the strict sense, not quite a popular magazine or street-side publication? What of alternative forms of research presentation?

In her editorial of issue 3.1 of postamble, Danai Mupotsa raises this issue when she writes that the journal provides space “for those of us still unsure of our position as ‘knowledge producers’ to think, write and share our work. A space which provides us, as a new generation of thinkers the opportunity to challenge the existing canon and enter into publication: a bold political move.”

This is an important statement of intent and of vision, which postamble will need to take forward as it engages in processes of self-reflection, self-criticism and regeneration. Importantly, there are no clear-cut answer to these questions and concerns; that they have been posed is the critical point.

This new website, I hope, will become an integral part of these internal processes of conceptualisation for the journal itself. However, it has also been thought of as a space not only for the work of the journal to emerge through the usual peer-reviewed submissions, photographic essays, book reviews, and the like, but also a space for our editors, contributors, and other interested individuals and collectivities to grapple in constructive and critical ways with the meanings of Africa and its Diaspora in the context of key global debates around race, culture, identity, and heritage, among others.

We can therefore look forward, I think, to a great deal of creativity and intelligent engagement in the months and years to come. The postamble editorial collective have recruited four new editors in 2008, who it is hoped will contribute to making and re-making the website through their own engagements. Our overseas editors will also be a part of stimulating the activities of the journal through their own interventions.

May the discussions commence.

-Gerard Ralphs

New website is live!

Welcome to postamble's new website! The site is still in the final stages of development so please bear with us as we finish up.

The current issue of postamble is available on our old site: www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za/postamble/.

Watch this space for the forthcoming issue of postamble, Science, Technology and Society in Africa.