E3W Literature | University of Texas

By Jeremy Dean and Barbara Harlow

Twenty years ago, four English professors—supported by stalwart colleagues in fields ranging from medieval studies to Victorian literature and in solidarity with the then also emerging concentration in Women, Gender and Literature—created an institutional space at The University of Texas at Austin for what were at the time understudied ethnic and third world literatures. This space took the form of a graduate student concentration and the program has in the intervening years become nationally recognized as among the strongest in its field. The Ethnic and Third World (e3w) Interest Group in the English department now organizes the annual Sequels Symposium at UT and publishes its own book review, this anniversary issue being the eighth volume of that publication. Looking back over the past twenty years of shared intellectual labor on the part of colleagues from within our group and across the field of ethnic and third world literary studies more broadly, this E3W Review of Books at once celebrates past achievements and probes critical perspectives
on the future of our scholarship.

As the table of contents for this volume suggests, our intention is at once to acknowledge the important cultural work of ethnic and third world literary studies and to put pressure on that field’s imaginary. As interviews with the Interest Group’s founders attest, the formation of the e3w Interest Group at UT, both institutionally and interpersonally, was critical to their intellectual work, and yet their careers have developed in vastly different directions. While each of the special sections in the issue is generally relevant to ethnic and third world studies, they are clearly and even unevenly shaped by distinct yet overlapping geographic terrains, political allegiances, and disciplinary conventions: African studies, African American studies, and Mexican American studies. While Ramón Saldívar’s most recent work looks back at one of the founding fathers of Mexican American studies, Américo Paredes, both Saldívar’s book and the review’s section “¿Estamos Post-Borderlands o No?” considers the border not only across nationalist and transnational contexts, but within still more global frameworks as well. Similarly, though Bernth Lindfors is a renowned Africanist scholar, his new edited collection focuses on the life and performances of a nineteenth century African American actor, Ira Aldridge, who toured mostly in Europe. The special section on African Studies, “Writing the African Imaginary,” accordingly traverses not only various geographies but multiple areas of study as well, whether asking us to consider Liberia as a fifty-first US state or speculating on the role of Africa in the writing of the British author Graham Greene.

The issue’s special section on African American studies in honor of the work of Wahneema Lubiano, “Building and Renovating the House of Race,” questions the assumed centrality of race in black literature, while at the same time acknowledging important nationalist concerns raised by its very study. Our contributors look beyond the borders of the US, back to Africa, throughout the Black Atlantic to Haiti and Nicaragua, even as they explore African American cultural identity. The final section on “The Shape of Resistance Literature,” with its expansive geographic and temporal scope, spanning from medieval Europe to contemporary Morocco, in turn exemplifies the movement between the localities and globalizations of the issue more broadly. From decolonization and nation-building to international human rights advocacy, the study of resistance literature, like ethnic and third world studies, has shifted with varying political urgencies. Throughout this volume of The E3W Review of Books, “Imperialism, Nationalism, Globalism,” global perspectives and nationalist politics converge and diverge in a remapping that both