Afrodeities Press
The Journal
The Journal of Afrodeities Press publishes short-form and long-form writing at the intersection of African mythology, epistemology, and civic thought. It is the working surface of the canon.
What the Journal Is
The thinking that precedes the book.
The Journal publishes essays, myth criticism, field notes, archive interventions, and critical responses to works within and adjacent to the Bridgeworks canon. It is not a magazine. It is not a blog. It is a record of serious intellectual work in progress, made available to readers who are working in the same tradition.
The Journal holds the same standard of engagement as the Press. Work published here treats African mythology as a knowledge system. It engages with ancestral memory, oral tradition, and spiritual cosmology with intellectual rigour. It does not use the tradition as backdrop, and it does not explain African thought to outsiders as its primary purpose.
The Journal is the working surface between one book and the next. The ideas that appear here are not preliminary sketches. They are contributions to a canon that is being built in public.
What We Publish
Five Forms of Writing
Essays
Sustained arguments, 2,000 to 7,000 words, engaging with African cosmological or epistemological questions. Essays in the Journal advance a position. They do not survey a field. They do not introduce a reader to African mythology from the outside.
Myth Criticism
Close critical reading of specific myths, ritual structures, or cosmological systems within African or Afro-descended traditions. Myth criticism in the Journal treats myth as primary text, not as source material for literary analysis.
Field Notes
Shorter dispatches, 800 to 2,000 words, from writers working inside one of the Compass Points regions. Field Notes document the living conditions of African mythological knowledge: what is being practised, preserved, contested, or lost in a specific place and time.
Archive Interventions
Writing that surfaces suppressed, mistranslated, or misattributed materials from the African mythological archive. Archive Interventions engage directly with source texts, oral records, or colonial-era distortions and offer corrective readings rooted in the tradition itself.
Canon Reviews
Critical responses to books, collections, films, and cultural works that engage seriously with the African mythological tradition. Canon Reviews are written from inside the tradition, not from a position of general literary journalism. They assess work against the standard of the canon, not against the market.
Editorial Standard
What the Journal Holds to
We publish writing that
Comes from within the tradition it is addressing, not from outside looking in
Has an argument, a position, or a specific observation to make: not a general overview
Advances the intellectual work of the Bridgeworks canon rather than sitting adjacent to it
Can be read by a serious general reader without requiring a specialist apparatus, but does not dumb down for the sake of accessibility
We do not publish writing that
Treats African mythology as a resource to be mined for other intellectual projects
Is primarily a piece of personal reflection or spiritual memoir: the Journal is not a wellness platform
Summarises what scholars have already said without adding a substantive position of its own
Reproduces the framework of the institutions it is critiquing while claiming to stand outside them
Submitting to the Journal
How to Pitch
The Journal accepts pitches and completed submissions on a rolling basis. There is no fixed submission window. We respond to pitches within three weeks and to completed submissions within six weeks.
Send pitches or completed pieces to journal@afrodeitiespress.com with the subject line: JOURNAL / [Form: Essay / Myth Criticism / Field Notes / Archive Intervention / Canon Review] / [Title or working title]
Pitch requirements
A summary of 200 to 400 words describing the piece’s argument or observation, the tradition it is working within, and why the Journal is the right place for it
A short biography indicating your relationship to the tradition you are writing from
An indication of form (Essay, Field Notes, etc.) and approximate word count
Completed submission requirements
The complete piece as a Word document or PDF, following our editorial conventions (no footnote-heavy academic apparatus; citations woven into the text where needed)
A short biography of 100 words indicating your regional base and your relationship to the tradition the piece is working within
Confirmation that the piece has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration at another publication
Pitch or Submit to the Journal
Send pitches and completed submissions to journal@afrodeitiespress.com
The Journal publishes on a rolling basis. We read every submission. We respond to pitches within three weeks and to completed pieces within six weeks.