A Case Study in Scholar-Led Open Access Publishing & A Mini-Manifesto for the Minor Humanities – punctum books

"...And so, the idea was born to do an edition of an Old Nubian text translated into a contemporary Nile-Nubian language. Because the strange thing is that, while Old Nubian is studied in the fringiest margins of academia, its existence and heritage are little known to the Nubians of today. The education systems of Egypt and Sudan, between which the Nubian territory has been split, systematically repress Nubian culture and heritage, or appropriate it within their own nationalist discourses. Moreover, the Nubian people have been subject to widespread forced dislocation, as a result of the inundation of their ancestral lands by dams in the Nile. The enormously traumatic impact of this exodus continues to be felt within the Nubian community. Through a colleague I was put in touch with Shafie El-Guzuuli, a tireless Andaandi language activist. Together we produced the first Andaandi translation of an Old Nubian text, the Miracle of Saint Mina. As a result I ended up at my first Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Conference, co-hosting a panel on Nubian languages, and then discovering that there was no venue in which to publish the proceedings of the Nubian panel. At the time, there were only a few extant academic journals that featured articles related to Nubian studies: the Journal of Juristic Papyrology at the University of Warsaw, the Beiträge zur Sudanforschung from the Society for the Promotion of Sudanese Studies at the University of Vienna, the journal Kush from the French Archeological Unit of the Sudan Antiquities Service, and Sudan & Nubia from the Sudan Archeological Research Society. None of these were oriented toward linguistic work, none of them were open-access journals, and the small nucleus of “early career” Nubian scholars that we had assembled at the conference thought that an open-access venue was essential in order to better include and reach Nubian scholars and scholars from Nubia in Egypt and Sudan. This is how the idea of open access and print-on-demand journal Dotawo was born, under the aegis of the following mission statement: Nubian studies need a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies brings these disparate fields together within the same fold, opening a cross-cultural and diachronic field where divergent approaches meet on common soil. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of old kingdoms. The proceedings of the conference were published in the first two issues of Dotawo in 2014 and 2015. The journal was hosted at the digital repository of Fairfield University, where my co-editor-in-chief Giovanni Ruffini is based, and the print versions are published by punctum books, where I have been co-director with Eileen Joy since October 2015...."