Introduction

Dear Readers,

Welcome to this general issue of Frontiers. The pieces in this issue do not address a single theme, but share a series of overlapping concerns related to women's speech and the authority to speak, the politics of narrative, and fraught relations of self and community. Anchoring the issue are Susanne Slavick's stunning images from her series R&R (. . . &R). In this series Slavick juxtaposes and fuses into one work black-and-white photographs of landscapes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East devastated by years of warfare with brilliantly colored images drawn from Persian paintings and architectural details from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. The images serve as the artist's witness, as she puts it, of "our seemingly miraculous recovery from incomprehensible and self-inflicted destruction." The result is a vision at once hopeful and despairing, the collision of narratives of creativity and destruction.

In the lead essay in this issue Holly Blackford also examines a collision of narratives, in this case of female ambition and domesticity in the novels of Louisa May Alcott. In a rereading of the Little Women triangle of Jo, Amy, and Laurie, Blackford shows how much of Alcott's bildungsroman depends on her earlier sensationalist novels, a genre that Jo herself must reject before Jo, who is also Alcott, can write the novel of female virtue and the home that will become Little Women. So too must the other striving artists in Little Women, "little Raphael" Amy and the Byronic Laurie, reject their ambitions for individual achievement and accept their destiny in marriage.

Joanne Cordón also rereads a bildungsroman, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Cordón deploys Hélène Cixous's concept of écriture feminine to point in a new direction an old debate about the feminism of Jane Austen. "Feminine writing," she argues, which "challenges misogynistic rhetorical norms for women," makes Austen a feminist. Cordón contrasts the plain, unaffected, and honest speech of Catherine Morland, Austen's heroine in Northanger Abbey, with the wholly artificial standard of female speech espoused in male-authored conduct books of the period, and she shows that not only does Catherine gain the love of Henry Tilney because of her honesty, in the process teaching him how to speak the same way, but the ambitions of the female character who most embodies the conduct-book standard are foiled by her own dishonesty.

In Marilyn Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayshi's essay on Carlos Bulosan's novel The Laughter of My Father, we move from the insights of Cixous on the way that patriarchy is enforced through language to Pierre Bourdieu's argument about the naturalized and dehistoricized power of male domination. Using Bourdieu's argument as a framework, Alquizola and Hirabayshi offer a gendered rereading of Bulosan's work, carefully situated in the time and place of Philippine peasant society shortly after the country was annexed by the United States. Alquizola and Hirabayshi show that it is the figure of the Mother, not the Father, who is the chief defender of the family in a time of neocolonial social dislocation.

Slavick's images combining old stories with new ones provide the bridge between the three rereadings of novels and our last two pieces, both of which address the politics of narratives as they affect individuals acting in their communities. Farah Godrej examines the interplay of public and private interlocutors in women's development of ownership over their self-understanding. She shows that one's chosen community of friends and colleagues, as well as the voices of authority that we internalize—whether we like it or not—interrogate, affirm, or reject what we believe to be true about ourselves and how we act on those beliefs.

Godrej emphasizes that the communities of interlocutors—both those around us and those living in our heads—neither speak with one voice nor offer a consistent message over time. This is a point with which Elizabeth Littell-Lamb would surely have no quarrel. Her essay examines feminist internationalists' fight for a child labor law in the International Settlement in 1920s Shanghai. Littell-Lamb traces the...