African Yearbook of Rhetoric
The African Yearbook of Rhetoric first appeared in 2010, in Namibia, thanks to my colleague Jairos Kangira, himself a doctoral graduate in rhetoric from Cape Town, and then on his way to become a dean.
About the African Yearbook of Rhetoric
The African Yearbook of Rhetoric first appeared in 2010, in Namibia, thanks to my colleague Jairos Kangira, himself a doctoral graduate in rhetoric from Cape Town, and then on his way to become a dean. It was a volume dedicated to gender, to which contributed international luminaries in rhetoric studies, along side young graduates. Ten years later it was incumbent on one of these brilliant graduates, now a postdoc, to guest edit the final volume, a celebration he smartly called " At Your Own Risk".
The African Yearbook of Rhetoric is now gone dormant.
Between 2010 and 2020 sixteen issues were published, that bore witness to our continuous effort to develop rhetoric on this continent, supported by the fellowship of colleagues from Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and this very continent.
For ten years the African Yearbook of Rhetoric maintained a policy: to be a multi-lingual, peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the development of rhetoric studies on, and in Africa. Some special issues were released under the imprint of The Elephant and the Obelisk. We have published original articles in French, Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. We have covered an array of topics. We have translated essays, and we have made available a thesaurus of archival works.
The Yearbook has served its strategic purpose: to sustain what some call "the Cape Town School of Rhetoric" by creating a locale for senior academics and aspirant rhetoricians to write side by side. The job is done. We move on. Times have changed.
Indeed, the academic ritual of journals spewing forth issues at each change of season, and updating relentlessly their virtual offerings, is archaic. It is a ritualistic concept of "research" that certainly enriches publishers and facilitates "metrics". Whether such academic fordism serves scholarship is doubtful. Plethora is never a sign of profundity.
The title African Yearbook of Rhetoric remains. How future volumes will take shape is anyone's guess. Occasional volumes may appear, possibly more tightly harnessed to the Law or legal critical studies. As we say in rhetoric: kairos will decide.
For now, as Editor of AYOR, I invite you to read those 16 volumes. Feel free to disseminate them, while respecting their integrity and crediting the source.
Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Legal data:
ISSN 2305-7785
Key title: African yearbook of rhetoric (Online)
Abbreviated key title: Afr. yearb. rhetor. (Online)
Print ISSN 2220-2188 or a dedicated ISBN for vol I, II, III of The Elephant and Obelisk series.
Contact: The Editor, philippe.salazar@uct.ac.za
Please note: The journal's original website will soon be de-activated. In addition to the Centre for Rhetoric Studies site, articles can aslo be retrieved from the SABINET platform.
