Aims and Scope
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry is a new peer-review journal that aims to deepen our grasp of postcolonial literary history, while enabling us to stay comprehensively informed of all critical developments in the field. The journal provides a forum for publishing research covering the full spectrum of postcolonial critical readings and approaches, whether these center on established or lesser known postcolonial writers or draw upon fields such as Modernism, Medievalism, Shakespeare and Victorian Studies that have hitherto not been considered central to postcolonial literary studies, yet have generated some of the best insights on postcolonialism. The journal aims to be critically robust, historically nuanced, and will put the broadly defined areas of literature and aesthetics at the center of postcolonial exploration and critique.
Papers Accepted
Article
Book Forum
Review Essay
Book Review
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Article Length
Manuscript submissions to the journal should be between a maximum of 8,000 words, not including notes. On rare occasions, the editors will give consideration to a lengthier submission of exceptional quality.
Preparing Your Article for Submission
The text and bibliographic documentation of the manuscript must conform to the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), 16th edition. We require that authors use footnotes rather than endnotes and that they doublespace the entire manuscript.
Manuscripts must have a separate title page that includes the author’s name, affiliation, e- mail address, postal address, an abstract of no more than 150 words, a list of keywords, an author bio of no more than 50 words, and a competing interests declaration (see below for guidance on what this declaration should look like). The author’s name should appear nowhere else in the manuscript. All references to the author’s work in the text or notes should be in the third person. Textual quotations in any language aside from English must be accompanied by a footnote with an English translation of the quoted text.
In the footnotes, full bibliographical documentation must be given in the first reference. Please refer to the following examples.
Books
1. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995).
2. Karin Barber, "Literature in Yoruba," Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, eds. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 357–78.
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
Journal articles
1. Eric Auerbach, "Philology and Weltliteratur," Trans. Edward Said and Marie Said. Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 1–17.
2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Tell Me, Sir, . . . What Is ‘Black’ Literature?" PMLA 105.1 (1990): 11–22.
In subsequent footnotes, use a shortened version of the main title. For example: Auerbach, "Philology," 12. The journal’s house style does not use "ibid." or "op. cit."
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. You can find out more on our Language Services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Tables & Artwork
Please review the standard guidance on preparing artwork and graphics for submission.
Seeking permissions for copyrighted material
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their main manuscript file. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Please review the journal's Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.