Author Guidelines
Postcolonial Text invites authors to submit manuscripts that fall within the focus and scope of the journal, as set out in "About the Journal."
Manuscripts should be at least 6,000 words and not much more than 8,000 words in length. Book Reviews should be 1000 to 1200 words in length.
Scholarly articles, book reviews, and interviews should conform to our House Style, the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. Additional instructions on the MLA style are to be found at St. Martin's Press and
MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, in its most current edition (currently, 8th edition).
This journal uses the list of works cited and parenthetical references (see examples given below).
We do not use footnotes. However, if you need to provide lengthier, additional points of information that the text cannot harmoniously accommodate, relegate these points to an Endnote.
N.B.:
"In your notes, avoid lengthy discussions that divert the reader's attention from the primary text. In general, comments that you cannot fit into the text should be omitted unless they provide essential justification or clarification of what you have written" (MLA Style Manual 7.5).
Additional Style Requirements for Postcolonial Text
1. Use only one space after periods, question marks, colons, etc.
2. Place endnotes numbers at the end of the sentence, immediately after the period, with no space between the period and the number.
3. Set punctuation marks (. , ?) at the end of a quoted passage within the quotation marks:
"He fell."
Coordinating punctuation (; :) does not fall within "the quotation marks":
"He fell"; I heard those words again.
4. Use double quotations marks whenever placing text in "quotation marks," with single quotation marks used only when needed inside of double ones: "I heard you say, 'He fell.'"
5. Place the citation for indented quotations (roughly any quote five or more lines long) after the final punctuation, like this, with no quotation marks around the indented quote. (29)
6. For quotations that are not indented, place the citation within the final punctuation, "like this, with quotation marks around the quote" (29).
7. Use the subtitle Works Cited for the list of works that are cited.
8. Do not insert the ABSTRACT of your article at the beginning of your essay, nor your name/affiliation. The ABSTRACT needs to be submitted in the metadata, as instructed.
Examples of Parenthetical Citation and Works Cited
For Deepika Bahri, "covert mercantile neo-colonialism, potent successor to modern colonialism, continues its virtually unchallenged march across the face of the earth, ensuring that the wretched will remain so" (59).
Coetzee's use of women narrators, Fiona Probyn believes, is "closely aligned to the poststructuralist configuration of the feminine as necessarily disruptive of narrative" (par. 1).
Fanon held that "what is often called the black soul is a white man's artifact" (Black Skin 14).
Challenges to colonialism seldom "run straight away along the lines of nationalism" (Fanon, Wretched 119).
Fanon set out the structural features of this debilitating colonialism:
Colonial domination.... is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women. (Wretched 123)
Works Cited
Bahri, Deepika. "Once More with Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?"
Ariel, vol. 26, no.1, 1995, pp. 51-82.
Bhabha, Homi. “On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture.” Townsend Center for the Humanities’ Forum on the Humanities and Public World, 14 April 2008, University of California, Berkeley, Keynote Address,
YouTube, 12 Feb. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp6j9Ozpn4.
"Cigarette Sales Fall 30% as California Tax Rises."
New York Times 14 Sep. 1999, p. A17.
Fanon, Frantz.
Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove, 1967.
---.
The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Pengiun, 1967.
Korang, Kwaku Larbi, and Stephen Slemon. "Post-colonialism and Language."
Writing and Africa, edited by Mpalive-Hangson Msiska and Paul Hyland. Longman, 1997, pp. 246-263.
Mutch, Thembi. “Sounds of Wisdom.”
Africa is a Country, 15 Apr. 2018, www.africasacountry.com/2018/04/sounds-of-wisdom. Accessed 2 May 2018.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. East African Educational Publishers, 1987.
Probyn, Fiona. "J. M. Coetzee: Writing With/Out Authority."
Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 7, no.1, 2002, www.social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7is1/probyn.htm. Accessed 20 Jun. 2017.
Sumlin, Todd. “Charleston Shooting Suspect’s Burger King Meal gets National Attention.”
Charlotte Observer, 24 June 2015, www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article25394389.html. Accessed 4 Jul. 2017.
