Publishing pillars
Scholarship in conversation with community.
Ngoma names the drum not as an object, but as a process—knowledge created through exchange. This pillar centers work that lives in dialogue: between theory and practice, scholar and community, past and future. Here, scholarship does not speak at people; it listens, responds, and evolves. Call & Response affirms that African-centered knowledge is collective, relational, and accountable.
Returning to retrieve what must guide us forward.
Sankofa reminds us that liberation requires remembrance. This pillar archives African and African-descended ways of knowing, honoring ancestral methodologies, oral traditions, and intellectual lineages often erased or dismissed by Eurocentric frameworks. Archive & Memory positions The Drumbeat as a living repository—one that safeguards wisdom while activating it for present and future struggles.
Where language, art, and spirit bring worlds into being.
Nommo speaks to the generative force of expression. This pillar holds poetry, visual art, storytelling, and creative scholarship that understands language as sacred and world-shaping. Voice & Creation celebrates Black expressive genius across forms, affirming that creativity is not supplemental to knowledge—it is knowledge, made visible, audible, and felt.
I am because we struggle, imagine, and build together.
Ubuntu grounds The Drumbeat in ethical responsibility and action. This pillar centers activism, organizing, pedagogy, and applied scholarship rooted in community accountability. Praxis & Liberation insists that African-centered knowledge must move—toward justice, toward healing, toward transformation. It is where thinking becomes doing, and doing becomes love in motion.
The Drumbeat 