Volume 49 marks the beginning of a new era for African Arts. Since the journal's inception in 1967 as “a quarterly magazine devoted to the graphic, plastic, performing, and literary arts of Africa, traditional and contemporary,” it has been produced out of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA by an editorial board composed of scholars affiliated with the university's academic departments and museums. A consulting editor board of international scholars has contributed their time and energies in advising the editors and assisting with peer review, but for nearly half a century, African Arts has been primarily a UCLA production.
This situation arose almost incidentally. Unlike many journals, African Arts is not the organ of a scholarly association, and association journals rotate their editorship on a regular basis, first, as a reflection of their diverse membership and, second, as a way to distribute the costs of running an...