We begin this issue of Feminist Studies with art, poetry, and prose that inspire our political engagement. The art works are by women from southern Afrida—the cover art calls us to join in a struggle for Namibian liberation, the inside prints in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

The poems are from a reading by women of color at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1985. Janice Mirikitani, Paula Gunn Allen, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde joined in this historical multiracial protest against apartheid, lending their voices to the demand that the regents of the University of California divest holdings in companies doing business with South Africa. The divestment a few months afterwards intimates the power of women's political culture, in concert with other initiatives, to effect genuine change.

Annette Kolodny's "Dancing between Left and Right: Feminism and the Academic Minefield in the 1980s," revisits the terrain of her influential Feminist Studies essay, "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," and finds that the minefield constituted by men's fears of sharing power and influence with women has not yet been safely detonated, notwithstanding ten years of (ostensible) dialogue between feminist and male critics. She demonstrates the ways in which male critics have expropriated, misrepresented, and attempted to contain the radical challenges posed by feminist criticism and calls for a renewal of political commitment on the part of feminists in the academy. In this disheartening political climate, when, as Kolodny suggests, feminist scholarship and criticism have become for too many a chic intellectual activity rather than part of a political practice, we found her call both timely and courageous.

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