African American historian Elsa Barkley Brown, in her contribution in this issue, uses jazz as a metaphor for a scholarly approach that might more effectively help feminists to explore the complexity of difference. In jazz, "the various voices in a piece of music may go their own ways but still be held together by their relationship to each other." That relational approach, which is now emerging in discipline after discipline among feminist scholars, is characteristic of many of the essays in this issue of Feminist Studies.

The first essay, Sagri Dhairyam's "'Artifacts for Survival: Remapping the Contours of Poetry with Audre Lorde," addresses the issue of literary critics' "vested interest in homogeneity" by examining critical responses to Lorde's poetry. Dhairyam argues that poetry is still defined as visionary timelessness by different communities of critics even as they remap Lorde's poetry-work which always insists on all her identities-according to their particular political agendas. While Dhairyam emphasizes the work of critics, Constance Coiner in "'No One's Private Ground: A Bakhtinian Reading of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle" discusses how Olsen's experimental narrative strategies release "potentially democratizing modes of discourse." Coiner delves into Olsen's ways of inviting a reader into her text so that she might see herself as one of its subjects and fill in its silences. In both Dhairyam's and Comer's analyses, the relationship between the author, the text, and different communities of readers becomes another element in a potentially politicized terrain that joins race, class, and gender differences to narrative strategies.

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Sagri Dhairyam
"Artifacts for Survival": Remapping the Contours of Poetry with Audre Lorde

Constance Coiner
"No One's Private Ground": A Bakhtinian Reading of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle

Iris Berger, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Nancy A. Hewitt
Intersections and Collision Courses: , Women, Blacks, and Workers Confront Gender, Race, and Class (Symposium)

Dolores Mitchell
Images of Exotic Women in Turn-of-the-Century Tobacco Art
(Art Essay)

Anne M. Boylan
Textbooks in U.S. Women's History (Review Essay)

Helen Duberstein
Prometheus Bound (Poetry)

P. Gabrielle Foreman
Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real,
Morrison and Allende on Call

Sarah S. Hughes
Beyond Eurocentrism: Developing World Women's Studies (Review Essay)

Gail Kligman
Abortion and International Adoption in Post-Ceausescu Romania (Commentary)

Jan Clausen
The End of History (Fiction)