Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction The start to a second volume ofa newjournal is often a time when finally the editor can not only catch her breath, and perhaps even cheer, but can also reflecton theways in which this new arrival is beginning to growand develop. Volume One was produced very soon after my move to Smith College, which followed three years ofhard work by the Smith-Wesleyan Editorial Group in setting up thejournal and bringing the contents ofthe first issue together. This was accomplished with the unwavering support ofRuth J. Simmons, then President ofSmith College, whose vision for a venue where women ofcolor could publish theirwork and have it taken seriously and on its own terms is now being realized. That the Ford Foundation also supports this initiative is a testament to the innovative character ofthe journal as well as to the determination and desire to link domestic and international issues reflected in the journal subtitle: "feminism , race, transnationalism." The Smith-Wesleyan Editorial Group, many ofwhom were part ofthe founding editorial group for the journal, has now been expanded, and I welcome Amrita Basu, Ambreen Hai, Indira Karamcheti, Renee Romano, Vicky Spelman, and Su Zheng as members ofthe local editorial group. Meridians is clearly filling a need. The office has received over 300 submissions , and the March 2001 conference, At the Meridians, attracted 40 presenters and over 400 participants. The conference panels interwove music, poetry, academic scholarship, and political insights intended to both continue and open debates initiated bywomen ofcolor/Third World women. Science, sexualities, front-line feminisms, memory, and political activism were some of the main themes presented at the conference, which also included music and drama performances. It is in the positive aftermath ofthat conference and on the eve ofthe United Nations World ConferenceAgainstRacism (unwcar) thatIwrite this Introduction. Volume 2, number 1 ofMeridians contains an essaywritten by Angela Y. Davis and Cassandra Shaylor on women's incarceration in the U.S.A., a piece thatis part ofthe submission oftheWomen ofColor Resource Center in Berkeley, California, to the unwcar. This issue also includes the following pieces which were first presented at the Meridians IX conference: Banu Subramaniam's essayon the rhetoric ofbiological invasions ; Sharon Horn's piece on the interconnections among biography, identity, place and globalization; and Lisa Suhair Majaj's reflections on writing and return, in her case, to Palestine. All ofthese essays hint at the significance oflinking the domestic with the transnational by contesting both of these categories, thus demonstrating the ways in which each informs the other. It is also the case that these categories become much more meaningful when they are engaged as themes whose boundaries are, at the veryleast, open to query, rather than as issues that simply frame a topic. For example, Subramaniam interrogates the "national rhetoric surrounding alien and exotic plants and animals" and shows how this rhetoric both shifts and is simultaneously shaped by the "xenophobia rampant in contemporary anxieties about a changingworld." Lisa Suhair Majaj, a self-defined Palestinian American, also engages with the national, discussing it as "home" when meditating on how "the issue of return has been persistently pushed to the border where it lingers: unheard but not unvoiced." Sharon Horn discusses "feminism as an encounter" that often remains parochial and blinkered despite, and at times because of, its desire to go global. The challenge to categorical thinking, often implicit in much of the work published in Meridians to date, may also be seen in the discussions that link intellectual and political work. Pumla Dineo Gqola's piece analyzes the often tense discussions between the Black Consciousness Movement (bcm) and blackwomen in South Africa by showing that "the space for the politicization ofBlackwomen's experiences fell outside the language" of the bcm. Cheryl Wall further develops her earlier pathbreaking ideas to look at the Harlem Renaissance with a fresh eye and reminds readers that "even as black feminist heresies become histories, black feminist scholars must be tolerant ofthe heresies they in turn provoke ," another instance of the intimate connections between the domains ofthe political and the intellectual. This connection between the political and the intellectual may also be seen in the powerful report by Meredith Tax on Woman's...