Introduction Gayle Gullett and Susan E. Gray Dear Readers, Some time ago Michelle Moravec, a historian at Rosemont College, wrote us that we ought to consider a special issue that takes a close look at what happened in the feminist art movement of the 1970s outside of New York City or Los Angeles. We were quite intrigued with this idea, and we are pleased to announce that Frontiers is in the process of putting together a special issue, “The Feminist Art Movement: Beyond NYC/LA,” that asks exactly this question. As pleased as we are to announce our special issue on the feminist art movement, we are equally delighted to introduce you to this general issue. Quite by serendipity, the pieces of this issue share a common concern—the relationships of gender, identity, and place in various international contexts. We feature the work of Gelsy Verna, an artist who investigates geography and identity. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1961, Verna moved as a child with her family first to Zaire and then to Canada. She attended college and graduate school in the United States, where she worked as a professor until her death in 2008. In 2005 Verna wrote, “My first memories are of Africa / I am not the Haitian you expected.” She collected various kinds of objects produced by African Americans and Africans, and one of the objects she collected was nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shoeshine boxes. You may have been puzzled when you saw the image on our cover; the image refers to a shoeshine box. Verna did not leave writings that explicate her use of such images, but she declared in an interview, “I like fragments in a sense that a fragment can give you a point of entry, but because you don’t have the whole, you could imagine.” We are left to imagine what meanings Verna invested in this shoebox, such as those that might reference race, place, and gender. The first two essays, by Ifeona Fulani and Julia Kuehn, analyze relationships among art, identity, and place. Fulani compares two novels, Corregidora [End Page ix] by Gayl Jones and Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, both dealing with late twentieth-century mother-daughter relationships in the African Diaspora. Both novels contend that these mother-daughter relationships are sites of colonialism. The daughters in these coming-of-age stories, whether they live in the United States or in the Caribbean, discover that their struggles to achieve emotional independence from their mothers are simultaneously battles to free themselves from the legacies of colonialism. Because of this conflation the daughters find that their efforts to build a stable self must also include efforts to build new, decolonized communities; to achieve emotional health, they must build new places. Julia Kuehn studies two European artists of the nineteenth century, Henriette Browne and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, who were both known as Orientalist artists determined to paint images of harems for European audiences. Both sought entrance into the harem as an artistic coup; as female artists they could, unlike their male counterparts, witness and document the harem. These women also envisioned themselves as challenging male depictions of the harem as a place of male sexual depravity and female victimization. They intended instead to represent the harem as a domestic space where wives lived everyday lives. But the women artists were also influenced by what they understood as the process of creating art, a process that ranged from issues of composition to artistic success in the marketplace. In response to such concerns the women created exotic representations of the harem. Two of the essays in this issue examine gender, identity, and place in Latin America of the 1940s and 1950s. Exploring the many discourses about Mexican women circulating in Mexico during World War II, Monica Rankin asserts that Mexican women were engaged in warfare on two fronts. Mexico joined the Allied forces, so Mexican women were called, by the Mexican and U.S. governments, to join the war effort. War propaganda, both national and transnational, asked women to support the war in gendered terms; women were requested to contribute to the war, for example, as mothers. But women’s participation in the...