Caribbean Quarterly

A journal of Caribbean culture

Caribbean Quarterly (CQ) was launched in 1949 by the then Extra Mural Department of the University College of the West Indies. Long regarded as the flagship journal of the university, it was revamped in 2010/2011, shortly after the death of its long-serving editor Professor Rex Nettleford. An editorial board appointed by Vice-Chancellor E. Nigel Harris formulated a new vision and strategic plan for CQ, sharpening its identity as a peer-reviewed “journal of Caribbean culture”, while encouraging a livelier diversity of material, therefore giving CQ a special place in the family of journals at The UWI, and especially in the global arena.

CQ's board and management are committed to supporting the continued development and international exposure of The UWI, mapped in The UWI's Triple A Strategic Plan as conceptualised by Vice-Chancellor Hilary Beckles. A seven-year partnership with Routledge/ Taylor and Francis group became effective in January 2016, whereby Taylor and Francis publishes CQ online as well as in print, and markets the journal—as well as the UWI brand overall—internationally and within the region. CQ has benefited tremendously from Taylor and Francis' existing marketing structure, extensive sales reach and global network, enabling us to showcase Caribbean cultural scholarship to a significantly wider global audience, while safeguarding our full editorial and design autonomy, and our integrity as a journal of high quality mandated to authentically represent, promote, develop and interrogate all aspects of Caribbean culture.

Access and agility

The academic year 2019/2020 saw the fourth year of CQ's publishing partnership with Routledge/ Taylor and Francis group. This partnership has continued to reap rewards in terms of global exposure (as noted in last year's report, in the first three years of the partnership the number of institutions with access to CQ increased by 23%; downloads increased by 164%; CQ's total revenues—and therefore earnings—increased by 79%).

In the year under review, CQ continued to ensure high-quality and timely publication of special and general issues in both electronic and print formats so as to establish and sustain The UWI's reputation as an institution of excellence, and continued to emphasise accessibility of style and content in order to maximise access of this content by a wide audience. Our publishing partners, in turn, continued to demonstrate agility in ensuring expanded global outreach of our content.

The partnership, therefore, has enabled CQ to participate fully in realising the goals of the Strategic Plan by facilitating an expansion of access to tertiary education and ensuring access of UWI scholarship to the global community; and by allowing for increased agility to national, regional and global opportunities in strengthening the UWI presence locally and on all continents via an increased online participation. This agility proved to be especially valuable as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic began to be felt in the last quarter of the academic year.

Alignment

The UWI's Triple A Strategic Plan calls for a strengthening of the alignment between industry and academia for wealth creation and distribution. By implication, there must be an alignment between society and academia overall. CQ's editorial board, which must approve all special issue proposals, is keenly aware of its role in promoting this alignment, whether through activism and public advocacy or a more general expansion of the societal knowledge base. Two special issues (December 2019 and June 2020) and two general issues (September 2019 and March 2020) were published in the year under review. Special issues provide a unique space for a detailed exploration of specific themes of significance to contemporary Caribbean development and culture. The December 2019 special issue on “Power, Performance and Play in Caribbean Carnival”, guest edited by Leeds-based scholar Emily Zobel Marshall, analyses and celebrates “the incredible cultural phenomenon of Caribbean Carnival” from a global perspective, recognising that “researching Caribbean Carnival cultures, at home and across the African diaspora, is central to an examination of the ways in which African diasporic cultures have resisted cultural oppression and . . . have continued to imagine greater freedoms”.

Our June 2020 special issue on “Crime in Selected Caribbean Territories”, guest edited by Dylan Kerrigan of the University of Leicester and UWI professor Paula Morgan, provides new cultural perspectives on what continues to be one of the biggest challenges to the region's development in contemporary times, asserting that “the articles in this issue provide examples of the penetrative insights an interdisciplinary approach brings to the study and understanding of crime in the Caribbean”. Both special issues, then, continue CQ's tradition of promoting discourse on matters of regional significance—matters which ultimately address the health and therefore wealth of the region.