EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: “WHERE WE’VE BEEN AND WHERE WE’RE HEADED” 

BY KEVIN GIBBS AND PAIGE WELSH

As Vijay Prashad reminds us in The Darker Nations, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project” (Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. The New Press, 2022.). Uniting the countries of the Third World was a belief that, through mutual support and solidarity, they could maintain independence from their former colonizers, those powerful states in the First and Second World; that their cultural achievements and contributions could be recognized globally; and that they could achieve economic parity with those nations who, for so long, took advantage of their labor and their natural resources, extracting them for their own benefit. Alfred Sauvy, the French academic who coined the term ‘the Third World,’ in the same breath likened the Third World to the Third Estate, that which represented the great majority of the people of France and would organize itself into the National Assembly. 

This etymology is important to remember, as those same forces that brought an end to the Third World, that redefined it as an impoverished ‘place,’ are alive and well. Volume 25 of the E3W Review of Books is uniquely positioned: after a quarter-century of Reviews a quarter-century into our new millennium, the future study of ethnic and Third World literature is increasingly uncertain in large swathes of the American academy. Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai wrote in “The End of Area” of the increasing irrelevance of Area Studies as a field, that Cold War schema rendered obsolete by globalization and the uneven development of the world. Cultural Studies programs in the US as well, it seems, are now similarly threatened, not by creeping obsolescence but rather by targeted attacks from the same entrenched powers that brought an end to the Third World itself. In the past few years we have seen programmatic closures of cultural studies departments, programs, and degree offerings across the country; and with the arrival of the new presidential administration that threat has only grown in scale. 

Against this background, this year’s Review—“Fantastic Futurisms: Institutions, Definitions, Deviations”—works to remind us that the E3W Review of Books refers not to a place but to a project. Projects, by definition, are oriented toward the future: they are built on the belief that the world can be not just different but better. Yet they also, first, require that assessment of the world extant—how it is now, and how it came to be this way. The reviews collected here do that work, providing reassessments of the past, characterizations of the present, and imaginings of a better future. 

In applying those same lessons to the work of the E3W Collective itself, we have again united the E3W Review of Books and the 2025 Sequels Symposium under the same title. Insofar as much of our work is centered on solidarity and coalition-building—in much the same way as the Third World sought to organize itself to resist the influences of the First and Second World—we recognize the value of ensuring both halves of E3W are in dialogue. To that end, we are delighted that this year’s shared theme celebrates the works of our Sequels Symposium keynote speakers, Dr. Jenna N. Hanchey (PhD Communications 2017) and Dr. Emily Bloom (PhD English 2012). 

It is also our pleasure to share reviews of several works authored and edited by University of Texas at Austin faculty. Frederick Luis Aldama’s (Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities) edited collection Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century is reviewed by Samantha J Ceballos, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the UT Austin Department of English. Allen MacDuffie’s (Department of English) Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century is reviewed by UT Austin Department of English postdoc and PhD graduate Michael Vaclav. Crip Genealogies, edited by Alison Kafer (Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies) and Julie Avril Minich (Department of English) alongside Mel Y. Chen and Eunjung Kim, is reviewed by Qianqian Li, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature here at UT Austin. James Slotta’s (Department of Anthropology) Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea is reviewed by UT Austin Rhetoric PhD Student (and co-editor of this volume) Paige Welsh. Scott R. Stroud’s (Department of Communication Studies) The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction is reviewed by Nishant Upadhyay, a PhD candidate in Asian Cultures and Civilization here at UT Austin. Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies Jennifer Wilks’s (Department of English) Carmen in Diaspora: Adaptation, Race, and Opera’s Most Famous Character is reviewed by I. B. Hopkins, a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English. Last but not least, Annie Hill’s (Department of Rhetoric and Writing) Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery is reviewed by Mia Bañuelos, a PhD student in the same department. 

In this current volume of the Review, we aim to include works that not only capture the current moment, but imagine futures radically different from our present. Kerri Kilmer and Rachel Spencer’s “Culture and Aesthetics” turns away from the explicitly political to the always already political. In foregrounding what critics may dismiss as ‘decorative,’ their section demonstrates the importance of the aesthetic and cultural realm—film, television, poetry, and dance, as well as museum exhibits—to our day-to-day lived experience. Together, these works suggest alternative imaginings. In the first review in the section, of Marcos Gonsalez’s Revolting Indolence: The Politics of Slacking, Lounging, and Daydreaming in Queer and Trans Latinx Culture, T Lim entertains queer alternatives to the omnipresent hustle culture. Next, Alex Keith’s review of For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability questions the tension between the increasingly public nature of disability and its private sequestered past through Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso’s companion piece to an exhibit of the same name at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The last two reviews in this section turn towards the Americas. Jessica Peña Torres’s review of Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation explores state power and public resistance through folklórico dance in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, while Samantha J. Ceballos turns toward the contemporary in her review of Latinx Television in the 21st Century, assessing the progress and shortcomings visible in Latinx television today. 

In their section “American Empire,” Lauren Bellatti and I. B. Hopkins bring into focus the empire that surrounds us: its current neo-imperial ambitions, the historical precedent that informs those ambitions, and the cultural productions that support and challenge that relationship. The section begins with Giulia A. Oprea’s review of Speculative Whiteness, which centers speculative fiction as a way of imagining alternatives to the present, both good and bad. Next, Chapman Matis’s review of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy turns instead toward the present, offering a diagnosis of a not only chronic but seemingly incurable political malaise. Mary Fons’s review of Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, in turning toward the survival tactics deployed by queer activists during the HIV/AIDS crisis, offers us hope in the current moment through solidarity and coalition building. Finally, the section concludes with Jo Hurt’s review of Monisha Das Gupta’s All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession, which likewise presents us with a path forward. Parallels between immigration and disability scholars prove fertile ground for a dialogue between the two, one that can potentially enrich scholarship and foreground activism. 

In her section “Indigenous Histories: Reevaluating the Past and Assessing the Present,” Courtney Welu works to center Indigenous people and their voices over those of their colonizers. In the section’s first review, of Killing Over Land: Murder and Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, Lauren Bellatti highlights the cruelty of the frontier and its endemic disregard for human life, where murder was frequently viewed as an opportunity for economic or political advantage. We see in James Bezotte’s review of Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance parallels between the struggles of Indigenous Americans and those of the Palestinian people against settler colonialism. We also see echoes of the possibility for political action seen earlier in the reviews of Blood Loss and All of Us or None, where actions of the past provide lessons for the present, and shared commitments to Indigenous self-determination  provide fertile ground for global solidarity. As with Alex Keith’s review of For Dear Life, Courtney Welu’s review of Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum accompanies an exhibition, in this case at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her review raises the question of how the museum, as a historically colonial institution, can become a space for Indigenous representation. Finally, in her review of James Slotta’s Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea, Paige Welsh concludes the section with a look towards the way Indigenous communities balance their own dignity, knowledge, and independence with those coming in from the Western world. To borrow a quote from Slotta, for the Yopno, “The trick—t­he art of anarchic listening—is knowing what to disregard and what to hold onto.” 

We turn toward the natural and ecological in Rianna Turner’s section “Earthly Entanglements.” Insofar as we have any future at all, we must attend to the environmental crisis to ensure our planet remains habitable. Beginning with Michael Mason’s review of In a Few Minutes Before Later, that very concern is rendered readily visible: how does the language we use to describe time shape our perception of the same? Halley Roberts’s review of The Politics of Love: Sex Reformers and the Nonhuman similarly looks at the anthropocentric concept of ‘love,’ and the way ‘love’ was used to divide human from nonhuman animals, where love was solely the domain of the former. In the next review of the section, of Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, Michael Vaclav describes how the logic behind climate change denial has roots traceable to the nineteenth century: because mankind is no longer exceptional, it cannot have an exceptional impact on the environment. The final reviews in the section shift from the natural to the anthropocentric. Nathaniel Wachtel’s review of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet, in its analysis of the electricity markets that continue to dissuade investment in green energy, assesses one failure of our society to reverse the ongoing environmental crisis. In her review of The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, Allison Pujol visits the shortcomings of neocolonial NGOs to decolonize the Global South, a critique especially prescient given the recent death of USAID. Finally, the section concludes with Junika Hawker-Thompson’s reviews of Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond. Through the metaphor of the pointer broom, we see how seemingly disparate processes—social, economic, cultural, ecological—are in fact inextricably linked. 

We are pleased to share the triumphant return of the section “Education & Pedagogy.” In her introduction to the section, Jo Hurt centers its importance: as we witness the violence aftermath of the protests against the genocide of the Palestinians, unprecedented attacks on public education, the collapse of DEI in higher education (and more broadly), and the de facto closure of the federal Department of Education, we must find ways to both advocate for the value of education and imagine alternatives to extant institutions. In the first review of the section, Autumn Reyes recognizes in Mimi Khúc’s dear elia: letters from the Asian American abyss that we are ‘unwell,’ and Khúc’s ‘pedagogy of unwellness’ offers a way of recognizing and theorizing what we do with that fact. In her review of Creating Our Own Lives: College Students with Intellectual Disability, Alyssa Nicole Fisher foregrounds narratives contributed by those students, offering insights often excluded from dominant accounts of higher education. Alexander Holt, in the third review of the section, sees ‘Black specificity,’ developed in On Blackness, Liveliness, and What it Means to Be Human: Towards Black Specificity in Higher Education, as a way to recognize a marginalized group and attend to current structural shortcomings in the university. Responding to a similar problem, Eliane Quintiliano Nascimento’s review of Black Feminist Writing: A Practical Guide to Publishing Academic Books provides advice to approach the publishing process informed by Black feminist theory, advice valuable to all who publish in the humanities and recognize that everything is political. In the last review of the section, Dan Dawer’s review of Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding is So Hard to Achieve turns from the comparatively specific field of higher education to the more universal experience of K-12 schooling. Dawer concludes that, while race-blind advocacy may seem appealing in this era of reactionary scrutiny, our best chance to fix our public schools requires confronting racism directly, rather than shying away from it. If we are left with no choice but to reimagine education as a whole in the US, the reviews collected here provide resources to begin doing so. 

As editor Weston Richey notes in the introduction to their section “Incarceration and Biopower,” we have seen in the last few months the return of a particularly violent sort of biopower, one that foregrounds imprisoned bodies at home and maimed bodies abroad, and one that the reviews in this section provide a framework for understanding. We begin with Qianqian Li’s review of the anthology Crip Genealogies, which presents ‘crip’ as an alternative to the orthodox ‘disability studies’ housed in the academy. Thus, Li’s review in part parallels those gathered in the section “Education & Pedagogy,” several of which similarly illuminate the limitations of the modern university and propose alternatives. In the next review, Isabella Neubauer draws attention to a different kind of body. As they assert in their review, Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World reflects on pop culture’s tendency to depict Black people as zombies, ultimately suggesting that much zombie media is a response to moments of anxiety surrounding race. As Crip Genealogies explores the term ‘crip,’ Weston Richey asserts that Freak Inheritance: Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance explores the varied meanings and uses of ‘freak,’ a label driven by a tension between diagnosable medical inferiority and recognizable cultural celebrity. In her review of Care: The Highest State of Capitalism, Francesca Passaseo moves us from bodies and theories thereof to the systems that manage, maintain, and control them; ultimately suggesting the only solution to our current ‘care’ crisis is a radical care separated from the competing demands of capitalism. The section ends with Carlee A. Baker’s review of I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art, which uses ‘scientific motherhood’ to explore the relationship between the personal and theoretical. Together, the reviews gathered here not only provide critical assessments of the past—of ‘freaks’ and zombie crazes—but also suggest alternatives: ‘crip’ scholarship, radical care. 

Our penultimate section—“Race and Identity,” edited by Mia Bañuelos—aims to gather reviews that elevate the voices and experiences of non-normative subjects. The first, Montez Jennings’s review of How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, blends the personal and professional, suggesting both the inseparability of the personal and the political, and the applicability of Black feminist theory to a broad range of experiences. In the following review of Left Turns in Brown Study, ethen peña grounds the text in the temporal. ‘Brown study’ can serve as not merely an analytic but also a ‘means of transformation,’ a forward looking way of doing things differently. The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran, as isaac dwyer argues in their review, looks abroad to Iran’s denial of its slave-holding past, suggesting that an unwillingness to face shameful histories is not limited to the Western world. In the fourth review of the section, of Asia After Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century, Floridell Berry traces the history of ‘Asianism,’ and in doing so raises the question brought about by the term itself: its accuracy, its associations, and its limitations. In their review of The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B.R. Ambedkar, Nishant Upadhyay not only recounts Ambedkar’s personal and political history, but also draws parallels to racial segregation in the US. Finally, Jumi Kim’s review of Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes concludes the section. Visibility and representation are of foremost concern to Sharpe, who ultimately suggests that liberal humanism has not only failed to include, but excluded, Black lives. Yet it does not stop there: as Jumi notes “the book insists on a beauty that is both borne of and exceeds the impossibilities of anti-Blackness,” a phrase that succinctly captures the Review entire’s relationship to temporality. 

This year’s Review closes with “Borders, Structures and Disruptions,” edited by Hamna Shahzah, Allysa Tellez, Sam Turner, and Trent Wintermeier. As they note in their introduction, since the inauguration of our 47th president, news of the border and the deportations of those who have crossed it both lawfully and unlawfully has become inescapable. The reviews collected here provide ways of theorizing the relationship between people and borders. To begin, I. B. Hopkins’s review of diasporic media in Carmen in Diaspora: Adaptation, Race, and Opera’s Most Famous Character evaluates both the universal appeal of Carmen as well as the endless specificity of its adaptations. In the next review of the section, Nina Kirkegaard describes how the recent novel Seúl, São Paulo is not a story of Korea or Brazil, as the title might suggest, but of Bolivia, and through its depictions of nations and borders explores what it means to be Bolivian. Mia Bañuelos’s review of Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery sits at the center of the section. Concerned as it is with both transnational movements—the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement in Minneapolis and in Bristol, England serves to introduce the monograph–and distinctly national pressures to foment anti-immigrant policies and attitudes in the UK, Bañuelos provides two different ways of viewing the border. Moving us from the twenty-first century to the medieval, Nina Gary’s review of England’s Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century pushes against the belief that the Jews of medieval England were ancillary to or excluded from the dominant culture, instead arguing that their lives and communities were inextricably entangled with those of the gentiles. The Review ends with Myles Joyce’s review of Charles L. Briggs’s Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine. Joyce’s review echoes in part Francesca Passaseo’s review of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, but instead of focusing on the shortcomings of the American system in particular, argues that Briggs’s takes a global approach, indicating how the incommunicable can be found everywhere, and the way it serves to delineate and disrupt the lives of those within, rather than without, nation states. 

As you finish the introduction and begin the review itself, we ask that you view this year’s Review as not merely a snapshot of recent criticism, preserved in space and time, but also as both a groundwork upon which future research can be based and a horizon against which it can be compared. The work of the E3W Collective is an always ongoing project, one not limited to the Reviews we publish and symposiums we hold, but instead inclusive of all our work informed by the shared belief that literature of and pertaining to the ethnic and Third World is worthy of serious consideration. And in tumultuous times like these, when that simple commitment is more controversial than it has any right to be, the work we do both together and apart is all the more important.