From 2017, Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies will be an online, Open Access journal published by Stockholm University Press. This change allows us to reach a larger audience than we could as a print journal, not least within the region that is at the center of the journal’s thematic concerns: the Caribbean, in all its linguistic and cultural diversity. We thank our former publishers, Novus Forlag, for the collaboration, and look forward to working with the experienced and ambitious team of Stockholm University Press.

The step towards electronic publishing will not affect the journal’s thematic approach. Research on Caribbean literature is still Karib’s point of entrance to engage in dialogue with other fields, notably history, anthropology, art, aesthetics, performance studies, and history of ideas. Due to the strong colonial and postcolonial heritage of the Caribbean, theoretical issues close to postcolonial studies are also at the core of the journal. Concerning the publishing form, the online format offers major advantages as it, for example, allows authors to experiment with moving images and sound that can be added to the text. We hope that these opportunities for submitting content in several formats will contribute to the journal’s transdisciplinary approach and also to the exploration of new terrain within literary theory and methodology that reaches beyond the focus on Caribbean literature and culture.

Karib works thematically through specific calls for paper, as testified by our latest CFP, “Curating the Caribbean: Museum Practice, History and Identity Formation”. However, the thematic sections are made available by a continuous publication strategy that also welcomes other articles within our general cross-disciplinary scope, as well as book reviews. On the one hand, this strategy secures a thematic breadth and, on the other, it ensures a rapid process from submission to publication of texts, since we publish articles as soon as they are accepted, typeset and approved for online publication. Articles may be submitted in English, Spanish or French. We are also happy to announce that our editorial board stays on board for the electronic adventure. The members are: Heidi Bojsen (Roskilde University), Adriana Méndez Rodenas (University of Missouri), Adrián Francisco-J Hernández (Durham University), Peter Hulme (University of Essex), Supriya M. Nair (Tulane University), Sally Price (College of William and Mary) and Keithley Woolward (College of the Bahamas).

Karib was founded to create a Nordic platform for the study of the Caribbean within humanistic fields. The attempt to bridge the cold Nordic Seas with the Caribbean – for historical as well as for contemporary reasons – can be seen as an expression of what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih call “minor transnationalisms”, contacts that are made from one periphery to another without necessarily going through the larger metropolis. As ambitious as it might sound, we want these transperipheric connections to summon Caribbeanists from all over the world to use this platform in order to rethink high quality research within the field. Through our step towards e-publishing, we thus hope to strengthen significantly the cross-cultural aspect of Karib’s authorship and readership.

Christina Kullberg & Hans Jacob Ohldieck, Editors of Karib.