Editorial introduction
written by Rianna Turner
If I were to rename this issue—against my admittedly-meager impulses to professionalism—according to the collection of reviews that ended up on my parabolic desk, I’d call it “Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs;” after, of course, the NME greatest-indie-love-song-of-all-time that expresses little to no relation between its title (“Maps”) and the other line in its chorus (“Wait, they don’t love you like I love you”). Here’s the song’s full chorus:
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you
Maps, wait
They don’t love (me) like I love you
Wait, they don’t love (me) like I love you
Maps, wait
Sillier still is the fact that the one vowel in the single-syllable word “maps” takes up nearly two measures; Karen O croons “wait” on the last beat of a two-bar phrase. To halt is an afterthought.
There are explanations. Some say “maps” is an acronym for “My Angus Please Stay” (Karen O was dating Liars frontman Angus Andrew in 2003). A map could be some visual stimulus provoking her appeal for the lover to pause before leaving. The map could signify an ideal plan for a relationship that can only obliquely accommodate the kind of love these people actually feel. All of these options end, though, in the AI-gone-undergraduate banalism that “the song explores themes of [insert experience],” which just doesn’t cut it.
Initially, the E3W board agreed on the title “Trade” to take advantage of three of the term’s valences: 1) global flows of goods and capital; 2) vocation; 3) the concessions—or, the mundane yet laborious actions that present as necessities and are experienced as ethical concessions—we make in order to survive and love. In its October sitting, the Supreme Court of the United States heard Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, which questioned whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorized the President of the United States to impose tariffs. On February 20, 2026, the court ruled against the President: cue the hesitant exhale of all who have read Article One of the US Constitution. Section Eight of that Article clearly states that “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Exercises.” Yet, for the months leading up to the court’s ruling, it wasn’t clear that the court would name this unconstitutional—and, much more importantly, materially-injurious—executive action as such. Thus characterizes the rhetorical standard set by institutions us humanists and social scientists are doomed, and tasked, to fail meeting.
Must we mean what we say? Yes—sometimes—on accident.
The question of meaning produced by this global-political event is important in the pedestrian way. Yet it also bears on the latter two definitions of “trade” outlined above: the vocation of the scholar, and the concessions individuals, with or without written “scholarship,” make to live with some sense of self-efficacy and connection to others. All of the reviews in this issue are written by graduate students. Early-career is often characterized as the Overton window in which we figure out what we want to say, and what we mean. But the reviews in this issue, and my conversations with other graduate students, indicate that we must also question whether other people know what they mean, and if there’s any intervention we can make to preserve language that has been stripped of its conceptual utility due to misuse and overuse. There are fifty ways to leave your lover, but there’s one way to kill a word: repetition. I tell my students that language offers at least one method of askew resurrection, though. This method is redescription: how do we learn to say the unspoken part, articulate the aura of a word-gone-mythic-totem? How do we take a word like ‘relationality’ or ‘interdisciplinarity’—or, goodness me, ‘futurity’—and reinvest it with some sense?
One response involves entertaining formalist analysis, not to advance claims about the integrity of particular methodologies, but to question which ‘concepts’ and ‘forms’—cultural studies’ sober gravities—have lost significance, and which are due for reactivation. This issue’s cover image invokes the form of the myth: Mercury is the god of trade, the planet that rules communication. (When mercury is in retrograde, communication breaks down.) Yet the form that reappears across this review’s sections is the map: a terrestrial mythic. “Cartography” designates a method in Jeremy Boorum’s review of Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance by Leon J. Hilton. In Nina Gary’s review of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England by Asa Simon Mittman, the mappamundi is a technology of racial othering; an objective form with mythicizing power. Kōan Brink reviews an archival document located in UT’s Harry Ransom Center: a letter from Richard Hakluyt to Abraham Ortelius, the Flemish cartographer who created an early modern atlas called the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). Brink’s review gestures to the potential ideological effects of apparently-teensy, economically-motivated changes to aesthetic and didactic forms.
Another response requires earnestness: turning to one’s own archive and accepting its affect-contingent logic. Each of the works featured in this review that were written by UT faculty typify earnestness-as-input; or, begin scholarly inquiry with attachment to a subject matter, community, or set of objects. It would be negligent not to reproduce the first sentence of Neville Hoad’s Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS, reviewed in this issue by Courtney Welu: “I realize, or imagine, that I have been researching and writing this book my entire adult life, maybe longer, often in ways that have felt more like living than researching or writing.” Personal and communal archives also become institutionalized in order to augment access, not gate-keep it. Elizabeth Martinez reviews María Eugenia Cotera’s Fleshing the Archive: An Intimate Genealogy of Chicana Knowledge Praxis, which tells stories from the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Project and Archive, an online digital repository that preserves Chicanx and Latinx texts and oral histories from the long Civil Rights Era. Cal Curran reviews Nate Kreuter and Mark Longaker’s microhistory of UT’s Department of Rhetoric and Writing, titled The Battle for Texas: Adjuncts, Composition and Culture Wars at UT Austin. Longaker, the current chair of the Rhetoric department, and Kreuter, a UT Rhetoric alum and now-professor at the University of Georgia, preserved all of their primary and secondary sources in a digital archive called RhetCompUTX. A recent addition to the Rhetoric department’s rich lineage is Megan Poole, whose work Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound is reviewed by Mia Bañuelos. Bañuelos writes that Poole “challenges her audience not only to let nature speak to them through these senses, but to orient their senses and listening practices toward nature.” Finally, Tushar Srivastava reviews Syed Akbar Hyder’s Qurratulain Hyder on the Move: Crossing the Frontiers of Gender, Language, and Nation. Srivastava reveres Akbar Hyder’s ability to contextualize Qurratulain Hyder’s writing in a wide-ranging literary genealogy as well as “at a cusp of Indian history where the recto of colonial subjugation has flipped into the verso of independence and self-rule.” Srivastava writes: “It is at this juncture that dichotomies of good-evil, fair-unfair, and violent-peaceful are all stripped naked, and the burden of historical action is transposed from the tyrant other to the lacking self.”
The map and the archive, then, concurrently index the power of the nation-state or academic institution and contain conceptual resources that re-ground our shared scholarly field in ‘the Earth,’ ‘history,’ or the fraught utility of ‘representation.’ In “Aesthetics: Sound, Touch, Text,” section editors Sisi Liu and Virginia Rodriguez recall Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory. They write that, even if reviewers and readers might disagree with Rancière’s contention that aesthetics does not effect persuasion, their section’s reviews emphasize that common aesthetic experience can change the cartography of the perceptible. This section includes Samuel Marentes’s review of Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration or the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life by UT alum Stephanie Elizondo Griest; Lucy Sternbach’s review of Carmen Winant’s art-book-gone-critique How We Practice; Jeremy Boorum’s review of Counter-cartographies; Libby Hayhurst’s review of Shakespeare and Antiblack Worldmaking by Matthieu Chapman; Khoa Nguyen’s review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and Sam Parrish’s review of The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children’s Literature, and Fandom in Putin’s Russia, written by Eliot Bornstein.
The following section, “Corpo(real)ties,” gets grimy. Editor Chris Snyder writes that the section “asks us to wonder with digestive folds, dripping honey, ‘unruly’ archives, intersex genitalia, salivary glads and hungers.” In other words—if the ‘real’ of representation is located somewhere in the body, one might as well relish in its squishiness. Sriyanka Basak reviews Dissident Gut: Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt by Jean Walton, and Paige Welsh reviews Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger by Sophie Chao; both texts attempt to move beyond the digestive metaphor—a close-at-hand description of other-incorporation—and toward materialist analyses of hunger. Kelvin Ronghan Qin reviews of Iain Morland’s Intersex: A Manifesto Against Medicalization, which critiques the pathologization of intersexuality via a referendum on the “self-estranged subject.” This section also includes Elizabeth Martinez’s review of Fleshing the Archive; Winona Gun’s review of Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair by Summer Kim Lee; and Lauren Schilling’s review of Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art by Lesley A. Wolff. Aesthetic representations of food thus take advantage of the digestive metaphor described above, using the in- prefix to collapse the corporeal: there’s no self that isn’t internally-estranged.
In “Diasporas and Crossings,” selves move. Editor Shukri Bana writes that the reviewed texts “push us toward an understanding of diaspora as not principally concerned with borders or ethnicity; rather, they envision a diaspora of disobedience.” Disobedience requires solidarity-in-difference, or, crossed identifications. Alongside Tushar Srivastava’s review of Qurratulain Hyder on the Move and Nina Gary’s review of Cartographies of Exclusion are Kevin Gibbs’s review of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora—an essay collection edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen that celebrates writing of the Vietnamese diaspora—and Halley Roberts’s review of Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing by Francisco E. Robles.
The section concerned with recent environmental criticism floats on the omphalos of modern global trade and diasporic movement: the sea. In the introduction to “Environments: Errant Oceans,” editor Madeline Bruegger reminds readers that coral reefs offer shelter for over 25 percent of all marine life—once they cross thermal thresholds, they expel their algae, causing bleaching, starvation, and collapse. This somber mantra echoes across the section’s reviews, which each seek intellectual procedures that reconnect people and their language to oceanic ecologies that can’t actually be known via intellectual procedures alone. Isaiah Frost Rivera reviews Cleo Wölfle Hazard’s Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice; Mia Bañuelos reviews Poole’s Listening to Beauty; Aden Morvice reviews Jonathan Howard’s Inhabitants of the Deep: the Blueness of Blackness; and Shannon Potter reviews Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World.
The final two sections—“Politics and Academies” and “Viralities and Vitalities”—redirect the review’s purview toward institutions. Editor Mia Bañuelos, in the introduction to the former, writes that these reviews and their attendant texts demonstrate the exigency of rhetorical critique that comes from inside institutions of learning. This is, of course, exemplified in Curran’s review of The Battles of Texas, in which two current professors of rhetoric reassess their own institutional lineage, but also in the reviews that follow: Daniel Dawer’s review of What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School by Kristen L. Buras; Michaela Pernetti’s review of The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education by Brian Soucek; Alejandro Madrigal’s review of Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth by Zahid R. Chaudhary; and Colleen Small’s review of After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization by Hamid Dabashi.
If the power-imaginary suggested by the preceding section-headings fussily sunders the individual from the spatial or the institutional, the final section reminds that power is networked, diffuse. In the introduction, editor Isabella Neubauer notes that the double-valence of “viralities” indicates “the rapid spread of both disease and information, making use of the dual networks of the internet and the body. Recent events, including the deletion or selective revision of government-owned webpages, remind us of the porosity of these media, the permeability of the body to temporary or chronic disease and of the internet to ideologies of harm.” Yet the books reviewed in this issue do not capitulate to harm’s dread. This section includes Jared Nabhan’s review of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment, and Care, edited by Angelica Duran and Pasquale Toscano; Courtney Welu’s review of Pandemic Genres; Giulia Oprea’s review of Interface Frictions: Digital Debility and the Politics of Design by Neta Alexander; I. B. Hopkins’s review of Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession by Jodi A. Byrd; and Alexander Cathis’s review of Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science by Kwame Anthony Appiah.
Though I’ve offered something of a map of this issue, I don’t want to assume the efficacy of that gesture. I’d rather return to the negligible link between “maps” and Karen O’s subsequent appeal to pause her lover before they walk into an austere world. One of the trades or concessions we make as embryonic academics—and maybe, also, sophisticated ones—is that between the love for language that gets to something, often by way of representation, and the awareness that even when our words mean something to us, our institutional and economic scaffolding can collapse in a single email. The sentiment-force of “Maps, wait / they don’t love you like I love you” lies in that dumb line break, that nonsensical gap between representation and adoration that makes us oscillate between returns-to-form and returns-to-feeling. The lover might not have waited, after all. But what an intimate little hole that gap can be!
