Ringside at the Revolution

Abstract

As the fiftieth anniversary of African Arts creeps up on us, it might be useful—even, dare I say it, entertaining—to look back at how the actual production of the journal has changed over that time. The content of the journal depends on the editorial board and peer reviewers, and even more, on the initial choice authors make to submit their articles to us. The subject matter that has interested scholars has changed, circled back, succumbed to the vagaries of fashion or the mere ability to get to certain areas to do field work, been sparked by chance encounters and strategic introductions. But what happens to that material—what it’s possible to do with that material—once it gets into my hands, as the executive editor and art director of the journal, is also constantly evolving. African Arts has always been remarkable for the amount of illustration included in its articles, which since the second volume has included a degree of full-color reproduction not normally found in an academic publication. We’re taking advantage of the evolution of publishing technology in several ways. Volume 47, no. 1, was the first to include an electronic supplement with video as well as still imagery in Courtnay Micots’s “Carnival in Ghana: Fancy Dress Street Parades and Competition”—something that we hope will become routine rather than a novelty in the coming years. We’ve just launched single-issue sales of the journal on Amazon’s Kindle, and it’s astonishing how crisp the pictures are even on an iPhone screen. However, although it has weathered a few redesigns, the print edition of the journal that arrives in a subscriber’s mailbox today is not a significantly different beast from Vol. 1, no. 1 in 1967. But what it takes to get those color images— and the text that goes with them—onto the page has changed radically. In 1967, manuscripts were submitted in multiple, typed hard copies, accompanied by photographs or slides, sent through the mail. In the early days of the journal, Alice McGaughey produced the thing virtually single handed; while Amy Futa did most of the text editing from the late 1970s on, Alice, in addition to her official role as Art Director—in charge of prepping the photographs and doing the layout—handled (continued on p. 4) circulation, accounting, advertising, printing oversight, US Post Office wrangling, and the overall editorial and financial guidance of the publication. And this oversight came at a cost: as Amy recalled in her In Memoriam for Alice, “Alice worked overtime, without compensation, without complaint, without acknowledgment by those outside our door. Her days at the office were twelve hours long, and she came in on weekends, sometimes both Saturday and Sunday.”1 The journal went out on time, because Alice subscribed to the journalists’ creed that the only excuse for missing a deadline is actually being dead. Putting a serial print publication together in those days was a hand craft. As Amy recalls: