An Editorial Philosophy of Book Reviews

An Editorial Philosophy of Book Reviews Travis Chi Wing Lau (bio) I have always had a strange attachment to the scholarly book review. It was one of the first forms of academic writing I learned to do in graduate school and one of the very first publication opportunities for me as a graduate student. In contrast to the argumentative, evidential peer-reviewed article, the review essay has always felt more "open" to me as a genre. By "open," I mean that the review essay does not bear the same obligations as an article which must pursue a singular set of ideas and arguments. Rather, the review essay invites unexpected connections with other works, ideas, traditions, and thinkers beyond the reviewed work itself. Contrary to literature reviews that open introductions to monographs or even individual book chapters or articles, academic book reviews invite responses to the work under review in ways that are not in service to a particular argument or scholarly project. Admittedly, this concept of "openness" came to me only after having learned how to write a book review through negation. I encountered so many formulaic book reviews that seemed to recycle a similar, linear formula: summary + praise + critique. While these reviews certainly get the job done in terms of signaling to potential readers what the work being reviewed might offer, they seldom achieve what I have found the strongest reviews model: how to enter into conversation with another scholar's work and how to contextualize that conversation within larger conversations in the field and in the profession. The ideal review, to me, is always dialogic in the generous spirit of inviting potential readers and interlocutors into a set of conversations catalyzed by the work being reviewed. In my experiences as a multiply marginalized scholar, so many of my interactions with editors have involved not only a gross mishandling of unprofessional and ungenerous peer reviews, but also a deep lack of transparency and self-awareness that has only shored up [End Page 243] an ongoing editorial gatekeeping that masquerades as rigor or prestige. While I do not mean to conflate different forms of review that coexist in the profession, my point is that the culture of review—how we talk about our own work and the work of others—is a direct product of the larger editorial culture in academe that remains deeply unregulated, untrained, and uncompensated, as well as perversely idiosyncratic to individual editors who can shape dominant practices (sometimes for decades). Because editors often step into these roles ill-prepared to do the always precarious and vulnerable work of supporting writers, they inadvertently reproduce this toxic culture among contributors, who are themselves potential editors and who come to see such toxicity and power play as integral to the work of editing. In my work now as Book Review Editor at Literature and Medicine, I find myself playing more of a pedagogical and facilitative role than a heavy-handed editorial one, which seldom helps reviewers understand my dialogic philosophy. Rather than dictating what the review needs to look like or where it needs to go, I spend most of my time inviting my reviewers to take ownership of their reviews, to see them as opportunities to critically appraise a work of scholarship in terms of its limits and affordances and to situate that work in relation to their areas of expertise or interest. True to the dialogic ideal I described earlier, I tend to ask many questions of reviewers in the feedback I provide them on earlier drafts: How does this work enable new forms of inquiry? How does this work model a particular methodological approach? How is this work indebted to others and how does it acknowledge that indebtedness? What has the work taught you and how might you apply the lessons of this work to your own scholarship? I have found that using open-ended questions helps to cultivate a conversational and self-reflexive ethos with reviewers who come to discover just how limiting the formulaic book review structure really is. Many new reviewers can feel intimidated by this arguably more demanding approach to reviewing, especially when they might feel inexperienced or unqualified to be responding...