Editor's Introduction: The Buzz of Africanist Energies Renewed

The Annual Meeting of our beloved African Studies Association is one of my favorite events on the academic calendar. I look forward to seeing old friends, learning about new research in dynamic panels, workshops, roundtables, Africa Now! and plenary sessions, and strategizing with brilliant colleagues about ideas, initiatives, and shared goals. The recent meeting in Atlanta met all of my expectations, and in abundance. Not only did I witness one of the best organized and best attended gatherings in the association's history, but the renewed energy was palpable. People celebrated new scholarship, some with cakes in the shape of books [see Figure 1]. They toasted collaborations at the bar. Others channeled their energies into diversifying the organization, democratizing its remit, and conceiving of innovative ways to ensure greater participation in the association, its committees, and its publications by our colleagues based on the African continent. The Editorial Collective salutes the leadership of the program co-chairs, Nana Akua Anyidoho and Mark Auslander, and the Local Arrangements Committee co-chairs, Jennie Burnet, Pamela Scully, and Harcourt Fuller.

The African Studies Review is deeply involved in Annual Meeting activities, and 2018 was a banner year for collaborations with our ASA membership and the Africanist scholarly community at large. Thanks largely to the valiant efforts of our Managing Editor, Kathryn Salucka, and our Executive Director, Suzanne Moyer Baazet, the ASR in collaboration with the Carnegie Fellows Program successfully hosted our fourth Pipeline for Emerging African Studies Scholars (PEASS) workshop [https://africanstudies.org/peass-workshops], with generous support from the University of Arizona's Africana Studies program [https://africana.arizona.edu/]. The workshop featured ten emerging scholars from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Togo, Uganda, the USA, and Zimbabwe. Mentors representing universities from the greater Atlanta area, from across the country, and from beyond provided rigorous and engaged feedback on pre-circulated work, with the goal of seeing it appear in print in peer-reviewed venues. The ASR's editors eagerly await the submission of this promising work.

Figure 1.

Nathan R. Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrance launch their new book "Africans in Exile" and website with a book-shaped cake in the Atlanta Marquis Marriott, December 1, 2018. Photo credit: Author

The Annual Meeting is also the opportunity for the Annual General Meeting of the journal's Editorial Collective, comprising the executive editorial team (those who perform the bulk of the day-to-day work of the journal), the Editorial Review Board, Emeritus Editors, and our publisher, Cambridge University Press. This year's meeting marked several important milestones, not the least of which was the completion of the editorial transition, with the retirement of editor Richard Waller. The AGM is the occasion for the discussion and adoption of the annual report. It also witnessed the passage of our strategic plan and a new statement about interdisciplinarity [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/information/statement-of-interdisciplinarity] and its intrinsic role in African studies. We formally adopted a proposal for the journal to become officially bilingual from mid-2019. This new policy will enable francophone authors to submit via the ScholarOne portal entirely in French. We also created new ad hoc sub-committees, one to investigate enhancing digitization and digital access, and a second to consider the creation of new prizes and awards. We welcome the involvement of our membership and readership in these deliberative processes.

The ASR's Annual Meeting activities are expansive because we play a leadership role, connecting the ASA membership to activities and publishing venues and creating new ventures with new collaborators. In Atlanta, a number of scholars met to plan a fifth PEASS workshop, in Dakar, in July 2019. This will be the first PEASS workshop entirely in French. Beyond the innovative PEASS workshop, 2018 also witnessed the relaunching of "meet-the-editors" activities with a new, interactive, and more personable format. Participants at the meeting had an opportunity to engage directly with editors of a dozen Africanist journals. In the Publish That Article! plenary session, editors were interviewed about...