Africultures

About Africultures

About Africultures

Africultures is a French cultural journal devoted to the contemporary arts and cultures of Africa and its diasporas. Founded in Paris in 1997, it documents and critically analyses artistic expression — cinema, literature, music, theatre, dance, visual arts and photography — together with the cultural and civic initiatives connected to Africa and the African diaspora. The journal carries the print ISSN 1276-2458 and the online ISSN 2271-1732. Its articles are distributed digitally through the Cairn platform with DOIs under the prefix 10.3917/afcul, and its print edition is associated with the Paris publisher L'Harmattan, which is the publisher recorded for this journal. Africultures describes its own mission in a single sentence: it documents and critiques the contemporary artistic expressions of Africa and its diaspora, and the cultural and citizen initiatives linked to them, and it does so across three forms — a website, a journal and a magazine.

Africultures needs to be understood as more than a periodical. The Africultures association, created in 1997, publishes the journal, runs one of the longest-established French-language websites on African cultures, and from 2007 also published the free bimonthly magazine Afriscope. The journal itself began as a monthly and later became quarterly. Its founding wager, set out in the association's own manifesto, was to treat African arts as contemporary — not as folklore, not as ethnographic evidence, but as present-day creation that also imagines the future. That wager, made when coverage of contemporary African art in the French press was thin, shaped a generation of critics, festival programmers and scholars, and it still defines what the journal publishes.

History: From a Monthly Journal to a Cultural Institution

The Africultures association was set up in 1997 out of a desire to view African arts as contemporary. The context was a decade in which African photography, cinema and literature were winning unprecedented international recognition — the Rencontres de Bamako photography biennale had been founded in 1994, African photographers were being shown at the Fondation Cartier and the Guggenheim, and the Revue Noire anthologies were redefining how African art was seen — yet sustained critical writing about this work, in French, by critics who followed it continuously, remained scarce. Africultures filled that gap with a monthly critical journal, a team of specialist writers, and, very early, a website that grew into a reference resource receiving thousands of visits a day.

As the association's own retrospective explains, the media landscape then changed: other magazines developed arts coverage, the web team grew, and an “Africultures effect” could be felt in French cultural journalism. The journal responded by changing pace and depth. Moving from monthly to quarterly publication, it repositioned itself as an analytical, critical journal giving creators more space and examining its subjects in greater depth, while the website took over the daily work of news, listings and short-form criticism, and Afriscope, launched in 2007, carried the association's coverage of community and diaspora cultural life in a free magazine format. This three-part structure — quarterly journal for depth, website for currency, magazine for outreach — is the mature form of the project, and researchers citing “Africultures” should be clear about which of the three they are citing, since the journal's numbered issues, archived on Cairn, are its formally citable scholarly record.

Editorial Outlook: Creolisation, Relation and the Refusal of Exoticism

Few cultural journals state their philosophy as explicitly as Africultures does, and authors need to understand it because it governs selection. The association's manifesto takes its bearings from the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, quoting his argument that creolisation is not fusion: each component persists even as it changes, a country that undergoes creolisation escapes standardisation, and the beauty of a country is enhanced by its multiplicity. From that starting point the manifesto builds the journal's working positions. African arts are to be documented and analysed as innovative, outward-looking contemporary forms — an antidote to the universalist tendencies that established racial hierarchies. Highlighting them is a way of deconstructing the colonial stereotypes that still fuel discrimination. The journal refuses to assign works to a fixed identity: it has constantly challenged the notion of “Africanity” itself, examining the creolisation at work in the world in an attempt to escape identity-based fixations.

The manifesto is equally explicit about what the journal is not. It is neither ideological nor political in the party sense; it defends art and creativity as a space in which barriers break down. It avoids exotic settings and folklore. It rejects the framing of diaspora culture through immigration alone, and it insists that diversity is not a problem to be managed but a concrete social resource — in its phrase, a project for life, for a future together. Critics writing for Africultures are therefore expected to engage works on their artistic terms first, to situate them historically and socially without reducing them to identity documents, and to write for a readership that includes the artists themselves. A submission that treats an African film, novel or exhibition merely as evidence about “Africa” in general will miss the journal's standard; a submission that follows a body of work closely, interviews its makers, and asks what it invents formally will meet it.

Scope and Content of the Journal

The journal's numbered issues are typically organised around dossiers — thematic clusters that anchor an issue — surrounded by criticism, interviews and essays. Its coverage spans the following areas.

• Cinema: African cinemas and diaspora filmmaking, festival coverage (the journal's critics have long followed African film festivals), director interviews, and essays on representation, including the place of Black actors in French cinema.
• Literature: Francophone African literature above all, with essays on generations of writers, the making of African literary classics, publishing and prizes, and the politics of language.
• Music and performance: contemporary African music, dance and theatre, from concert and stage criticism to industry analysis.
• Visual arts and photography: exhibitions, biennales, photography's history on the continent and in the diaspora, and the market and museum politics that surround African art.
• Cultural policy and society: cultural institutions, heritage, memory and postcolonial debate, including concepts the journal has helped circulate, such as Achille Mbembe's essay on Afropolitanism, published in Africultures 99–100 (2015).
• Diaspora cultures: Black cultures in France and across the Atlantic world, treated as part of the same interrelated field as continental production — the “mondes en relations”, interrelated worlds, of the journal's subtitle.

The website extends this scope daily in French, with several thousand articles searchable online, while the journal issues carry the long-form dossiers. Cornell University's Francophone studies guide describes the site accurately as covering the arts, cinema, literature, music, theatre and other cultural topics for many African countries and beyond, with a focus mainly on Francophone Africa. That Francophone centre of gravity is real — the journal publishes in French and its historical networks run through Paris, Dakar, Abidjan, Bamako and the Caribbean — but its subject is the whole African cultural world and its diasporas, including Anglophone and Lusophone production when it enters the journal's conversations.

How the Journal Is Published and Found

Africultures is a French journal published in France by its association, with L'Harmattan recorded as publisher of the journal — L'Harmattan being one of Paris's major independent publishers of African and Francophone studies, whose bookshops and distribution have long served this field. Digitally, the journal's issues are hosted on Cairn, the French-language humanities and social-science platform used by most French scholarly journals, where each article receives a DOI under the prefix 10.3917/afcul (for example 10.3917/afcul.099.0025 for Mbembe's Afropolitanism essay, and 10.3917/afcul.068.0207 for an article in issue 68). Cairn's records are the authoritative route for libraries: the online ISSN 2271-1732 belongs to that digital edition, while 1276-2458 identifies the print edition libraries have shelved since 1997.

For citation practice, three points matter. First, Africultures issues are frequently double or themed numbers (issues 92–93, 99–100), so citations should give the full issue designation as printed. Second, the website's article numbering (its internal “Article N°”) is a web archive reference, not a journal citation; scholars should cite the journal issue, year and pages or DOI where the piece appeared in the journal, and cite web-only pieces by their site record. Third, because the journal's back run is long and partly predates digital distribution, library holdings through the print ISSN remain an important access route for the earliest years.

Peer Review, Academic Standing and Honest Limits

Africultures is best characterised as a critical and cultural journal with a scholarly readership, rather than as a conventional research journal organised around anonymous peer review of empirical articles. Its authority comes from continuity (publication since 1997), from the specialisation of its critics, from its dossier format, and from its uptake: its essays are cited in dissertations and monographs on African cinema, literature and art, its concepts (Afropolitanism among them) circulate through the international literature, and its archive is a standard research tool in Francophone African studies. It is not indexed as a Web of Science or Scopus research journal with an impact factor, and this profile claims no such metric for it. Researchers who need a Scopus-quartile outlet for formal evaluation should choose accordingly; researchers who need their work read by the Francophone African-studies community, by festival and museum professionals, and by the artists' own milieu will find few venues with deeper roots in that world.

Fees, honoraria and formal submission mechanics for the journal are not publicly disclosed in a form this profile could verify from an official source, and they are therefore not stated here. Africultures works largely through its network of critics and commissioned dossiers; prospective contributors are advised to approach the editorial team through the official website with a proposal that shows close knowledge of the journal's dossiers and debates, rather than sending an unsolicited full manuscript in the style of a conventional journal submission system.

Writing for Africultures: What Fits

A strong Africultures piece usually does four things. It starts from works — films, books, exhibitions, albums, performances — examined closely and concretely. It places those works in relation: to other works, to a history, to a debate about identity, memory or form. It writes critically rather than promotionally; the journal's manifesto commits it to analysis over publicity, and its editors are explicit that they seek to enrich the relation between cultural players and their public rather than to dispense praise. And it writes in French of publishable quality, in the essayistic register the journal favours, where a critic's voice is an asset rather than a breach of protocol. Interviews with creators are a signature genre: the journal gives creators space to speak, and many of its most cited pieces are conversations in which an artist's self-understanding enters the scholarly record.

Pieces that fit poorly include purely theoretical essays with no body of work under discussion, area-studies reports that use culture as illustration of a political argument, and coverage written from outside the field's debates. The journal's long memory is also a standard: Africultures has covered African photography since the Bamako encounters of the 1990s, African cinema across decades of festivals, and Francophone literature across generations of writers from the 1956 Paris congress of Black writers and artists onward. A contributor is expected to know that this archive exists and to write in awareness of it.

Africultures as a Research Resource

For scholars, the value of Africultures extends well beyond submitting to it. Its archive functions as a primary source for the history of African cultural production over nearly three decades. Because its critics attended the festivals, exhibitions and book launches as they happened — Bamako's photography encounters, FESPACO and other film festivals, the Paris salons where Francophone African books are launched — the journal preserves contemporary reception: what was said about a work when it appeared, by critics writing inside the milieu, before later academic consensus formed. Reception history, interview material with artists who have since died or changed direction, and documentation of small cultural initiatives that left no other trace all survive in these pages. Doctoral researchers in African cinema, Francophone literature and curatorial studies mine the archive for exactly this reason, and the website's search across thousands of articles makes the web layer a discovery tool even for material whose definitive version sits in a print issue.

The journal also documents a specifically French-African institutional story that researchers of cultural policy need. The manifesto's arguments about diversity, creolisation and the place of diaspora cultures in the French national narrative were interventions in live French debates about integration, laïcité and cultural funding, made by an association of critics many of whom worked across France, Africa and the Caribbean. Read today, the journal's dossiers trace how those debates moved: from the defence of African arts' contemporaneity in the late 1990s, through the memory debates of the 2000s, to Afropolitanism and the decolonial discussions of the 2010s. A researcher tracing any of those threads will find Africultures cited on all sides, which is the practical definition of a field-shaping journal.

One caution belongs in any research use. Africultures is a journal of criticism, and its pieces carry their authors' positions. Its interviews are testimony, its reviews are judgements, and its dossiers are arguments. That is their evidentiary strength — they record what informed participants thought — provided the researcher cites them as criticism and testimony rather than as neutral reportage, and triangulates factual claims about dates, institutions and events against catalogues and institutional records.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Africultures?
Print ISSN 1276-2458 and online ISSN 2271-1732.

When was Africultures founded?
In 1997, in Paris, when the Africultures association was set up and the journal was launched. The journal began as a monthly and later became quarterly.

Who publishes Africultures?
The Africultures association publishes the journal, its website and (from 2007) the Afriscope magazine; L'Harmattan is the publisher recorded for the journal itself.

What does Africultures cover?
Contemporary artistic expression from Africa and its diasporas — cinema, literature, music, theatre, dance, visual arts and photography — plus cultural and civic initiatives connected to that world.

Where can the journal be read online?
Journal issues are distributed on the Cairn platform with DOIs under the prefix 10.3917/afcul; the association's website, africultures.com, carries thousands of articles and daily cultural coverage in French.

Is Africultures an impact-factor journal?
No Journal Impact Factor or Scopus quartile could be verified for it, and none is claimed here. It is a critical cultural journal whose standing rests on its archive, its specialist critics and its influence within Francophone African cultural studies.

What is Afriscope?
A free bimonthly magazine launched by the association in 2007, complementing the journal with coverage of associations' activities and diaspora cultural events.

In what language does it publish?
French. The website has carried English versions of selected content, but the journal itself is a French-language publication.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is anchored to the identifiers on the journal's Journals World record (ISSN 1276-2458 and 2271-1732; publisher L'Harmattan; official site africultures.com) and to the Africultures association's own manifesto, “Africultures: Interrelated Worlds”, published on its website, which confirms the 1997 founding, the monthly-to-quarterly history, the Afriscope launch in 2007 and the journal's editorial philosophy. Cairn-distributed article records confirm the DOI prefix 10.3917/afcul and the issue sequence. Library guides (Cornell University) corroborate the subject coverage and the scale of the web archive. No fee, review-time or impact metric is stated, because none could be verified from an official source.