Prior to submitting, you must read our submission guidelines.
To provide full range for the development of Black thought in a climate where fora are still limited, we emphasize writings by Black authors. The journal retains its policy of publishing both academic and non-academic intellectuals from a variety of professions and walks of life and its choices are the sole responsibility of its editorial staff.
We are committed to interdisciplinary conversation with an interested public who may not be as intimate with the professional language or styles of certain academic trends and discourses. Publication in TBS provides a rare opportunity to reach a broader audience, so please keep in mind the breadth of Black readership that will be eager to engage the work. The goal here is to elucidate as well as inform, without compromising scholarly credibility and intellectual merit. As a cutting-edge venue, TBS is tolerant and inviting of different modes of expression, but authors should submit with this mandate in mind.
Language that fetishizes itself and the author’s primary academic micro-community may not pass muster. It is also important that authors resist the clichés that have emerged in contemporary Black cultural criticism and political ideology. For example, work that merely depends on the oppression/resistance binary, or that generates laudatory but uncritical and romantic celebrations of ideas like radicalism or blackness but does nothing to ground those ideas in material examples or more contradictory realities, also may not pass muster. There is much more to Black intellectual and cultural production than such gestures, and TBS insists on going beyond even the limits Black thinkers may put on themselves.
