From its inception, Critical Arts examined the relationship between texts and contexts, cultural formations and popular forms of expression, mainly in the Third World, but after the 1994 transition in South Africa Critical Arts repositioned itself in the South-North and East-West nexus focusing on developing transdisciplinary epistemologies. Critical Arts ' authors are Africans debating Africa with the rest; and the rest debating Africa and the South and with each other.
The journal is rigorously peer reviewed, via ScholarONE Manuscripts, and aims to shape theory on the topics it covers. Cutting edge theorisation (supported by empirical evidence) rather than the reporting of formulaic case studies are preferred as submissions. Submissions are sought from both established and new researchers, and recent topics have included political economy of the media, political communication, intellectual property rights, visual anthropology and indigeneity, the ethnographic turn in art, and of course cultural studies. Submissions must, perhaps, aim to restore the vision of earlier theorists and historians, for whom ‘culture’ was a kind of synthesis arising from the contradictions between human society and the politics of nations. Under the pressures of globalization, this kind of understanding becomes more relevant at every turn. Critical Arts seeks to profile those approaches to issues that are amenable to a cultural studies-derived intervention, on the basis that ‘culture’ is a marker of deeper continuities than the immediate conflicts under the fire of which so many must somehow live their lives.