Before there was Womanist Theory & Research, there was The Womanist:  A Women of Color Journal.  This journal, which premiered in Spring 1992, was the brainchild of five students -- Agbanyero Chukwudebe, Nicole Gonzales, Salome Portugal, Nyanza Shaw, and Patty M. Wakida -- and one faculty member, Dr. Dorothy Randall Tsuruta, at the all-women's Mills College in Oakland, California.  Calling itself The Womanist Organizing Sisterhood, this group rose in response to the cry for voice and visibility among the women-of-color students at Mills.  As the preface to the premiere journal states, "We Dedicate our First Issue to The Class of 1992 Who Believed that Women of Color Should Find their own Voices."  Behind this dedication is the fact that, after Mills  successfully battled to remain an all-women's college, the women-of-color students and faculty there demanded that it become a "college for all women."  To this end, The Class of 1992 designated its gift as three years' funding for the annual journal.  

Each issue of the journal opens with the tribute:  "With appreciation and love for Alice Walker who gave us Womanist to describe self-identified and self-defined women of color."  In the production of the journal, the Organizing Sisterhood received help and inspiration from a number of people whose names appear in subsequent journal dedications.  The Spring 1993 issue is dedicated to Angela Davis, with a quotation from her address to the campus body:  "It is up to the younger generation to develop new ways of protesting derived out of their experiences."  The Spring 1994 issue is dedicated to "the life work of César E. Chávez and to the continued work of Dolores Huerta," who spoke at Mills in 1994.  The Spring 1995 issue is dedicated to "the spirit of activism, honoring the activist in all of us."  Finally, the latest issue, Spring 1996, newly redesigned, is dedicated to Dorothy Tsuruta, "for her indomitable spirit in the struggle to support equality for women of color."  These tributes and dedications set the tone for both the contents and the character of The Womanist: A Women of Color Journal.  Scholarship, creativity, and activism are all colorful and dynamic threads which interweave to form the fabric of this extremely innovative and signal publication.

The journal is devoted to poetry, prose, visual art, and photography by women of color at Mills College.  But even at this small institution, what a panoply of women!  The degree of representational diversity achieved by the journal is worthy of commendation -- and emulation.  The Organizing Sisterhood included African-American, Chicana, Japanese-American, Latina, and Nigerian women.  Beyond this, the first list of contributors also encompassed Chinese, and Osage and other Native American women.  Later lists included Middle Eastern, East Asian Indian, Filipina, Vietnamese, Algonquian, Cuban, Guyanese, Guyanese/Jamaican, Chinese/Jamaican, Korean/African-American, Seminole/Irish, and Dine/Hopi/Apache/Jemez Pueblo women.  Some work appears in Spanish or French; words and phrases from various Asian and Indian languages appear; many pieces are a mix of English and another language.  Each issue opens with a collectively written "Merging Voices Editorial" in which the words of many different individual women are brought together without truncation or abridgement around a common theme.  The fifth issue is unique in that the "Merging Voices Editorial" is its newly redesigned cover -- a photograph of the touching and overlaid hands of women and girls of many ages, colors, shapes, and sizes.  In several issues, writers' bios add an additional dimension to their creative contributions.  Much of the written work is autobiographical or semi-autobiographical, giving readers windows into many lives. 

But the diversity does not stop with ethnicity.  The publication also represents women of many ages and sexualities.  Particularly in later issues, the voices of returning students (typically older, many with children and unique career histories) and high-school students (participating in Mills' Upward Bound program), alongside traditional-aged college students and faculty of various ages, become distinct.  The voices of lesbians and bisexual women, as well as straight women, achieve individual clarity and expression.  Finally, in the Spring 1996 issue, male voices (from the Upward Bound program) for the first time appear, to resonate with Alice Walker's definition of a womanist as "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female" (Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983], p. xi).

Despite this intrafeminine and intergendered diversity, certain telling themes appear across the many issues of the journal in order to unify the writing.  One theme is family -- in particular, intergenerational linkage.  Poems and stories about mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, sisters, brothers, sons, fathers, aunts, and uncles abound.  These stories reflect both the struggle for individuation and the yearning for reconnection.  Women of many cultural backgrounds write about striving for self-expression against confining traditional cultural backdrops: the needs to be American (albeit a proudly hyphenated one) in America, to be outspoken, to be political, to be  feminist, to be sexual, to be queer, even to be educated along a desired course of study or to wear the clothes of one's choosing.

Defying the white, middle-class, feminist context which, in the estimation of some, pervades Mills and swallows its women of color, other women write passionately about the struggle against cultural invisibility and subsumption.  This writing reflects a second unifying theme: the struggle to exist as a woman of color in the academy.  While The Womanist: A Women of Color Journal is a testament to a high degree of interaction, involvement, and mutual support among students (both college and high-school) and faculty at Mills, it is clear that Mills is a microcosm of the world affecting a large proportion of women of color in the academy at any level.  The experiences of these women still resonate with that now-legendary book title by Hull, Smith, and Bell-Scott, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982), as well as with the resounding sentiment of the women attending the first national conference of Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name in Boston (January 1994; also see Karen Winkler's Chronicle of Higher Education article, 30 Mar. 1994, p. 20).  The women of the Mills College Womanist write about living and working in the shadow of the pervasive stereotype of the "angry" woman of color, about the academy's neglect and eschewal of "the everyday" that is so much a part of their lives outside its walls, about straddling the accusations that they are "too cultural" or "not cultural enough," about trying to balance audiences -- all while retaining their sanity and keeping up with their coursework.

A third theme that appears repeatedly is activism.  Like their extramural Bay Area contemporaries and compatriots, Mills' women of color have not been content merely to observe and condemn the status quo.  Rather, they have insisted upon changing it -- and Mills' Womanist has reflected this fact while also serving as its vehicle.  The evolution of this commitment to activism can be observed across issues:  While the first issue (Spring 1992) was the result of an act of activism, the second and third issues (Spring 1993 and Spring 1994) were dedicated to specific activists of national stature: namely, Davis, Chávez, and Huerta.  As noted previously, the fourth issue (Spring 1995) was dedicated to "the spirit of activism" and "the activist in all of us."  The fifth and most current issue (Spring 1996) was dedicated to co-founder, longtime supporter, and Mills faculty member Dorothy Tsuruta, whose activism, while local, was integral to the Mills College Womanist enterprise.  This issue also contains a first-page list of demands directed at the Mills College administration.  A partial list of these broad-ranging yet focused demands includes:  improving the tenure process for faculty of color and including students in the tenure review process; increasing student-of-color population and retention; increasing recruitment of faculty of color, gay/lesbian/bisexual faculty, and differently-abled faculty; creating affordable and accessible infant, child, and day care on campus; addressing racist attitudes of the administration towards women of color; and guaranteeing a multicultural approach to all courses.  Between 1992 and 1994, the activism of the women of color on campus also brought about the creation of a Women of Color Resource Center at Mills.

The Womanist: A Women of Color Journal succeeds brilliantly in its effort to be a journal for women, plural.  It provides a model for the representation of unity in diversity, whether that diversity is within populations of women who share a common ethnicity or between women whose ethnicities differ.  The journal serves to highlight the way women who appear similar on the outside may be different on the inside, as well as the way that women who appear different on the outside may be similar on the inside.  It stops short of forcing a homogenizing discourse and it steers clear of generating an exclusionary discourse.  In short, it does everything that we would like to do.  Out of respect for this burgeoning publication, in an effort to secure its distinctiveness, and out of a desire to introduce it to a wider audience, we changed our name:  We are no longer The Womanist:  A Journal for Afrocentric Feminist Researchers, but rather we are now Womanist Theory & Research.  It is our hope that we can, retroactively, trace our birth to this older journal, produced by younger women, and enrich the legacy of womanists everywhere. 

With our new journal, we propose to enlarge the circle of voices we represent and support so as to actively include all women of color and provide a forum for their words (whether literal or visual) and ideas.  Hence, as an invitation to all practicing womanists and feminists of color, we are dropping the subtitle A Journal for Afrocentric Feminist Researchers, and we are adding Theory & Research as an assistance to our sisters in the academy who may be struggling for validation of their womanist work and perspectives.  That is, unlike Mills' Womanist, our journal will focus on scholarship -- theory and research -- rather than creative writing.  Like Mills' editors, however, we will continue to publish visual art, not exclusively focusing on photography.  Similar to the organizers of Mills' Womanist, we hope to retain the "everyday" sensibility so well known and important to many women of color, thus creating an accessible journal that can be utilized by sisters outside the academy as well as inside.  And, finally, like Mills' Womanist, but unlike so many other journals in the academy, Womanist Theory & Research plans to encourage the incorporation of activist voices and perspectives into what is purportedly an academic publication, in an attempt to lessen the distance between scholarship and social change.

It is with profound thanks and respect that we acknowledge The Womanist:  A Women of Color Journal.  In the spirit of recognizing womanists wherever we find them, and giving a boost to women who went out on a limb to proclaim themselves womanist when to do so presented possible risk to themselves, we would like to name and thank each of the contributors to The Womanist: A Women of Color Journal at Mills College.  We stand on your shoulders, wherever you are!

Organizing Sisterhood:

Agbanyero Chukwudebe

Nicole Gonzales

Salome Portugal

Nyanza Shaw

Dr. Dorothy Randall Tsuruta

Patty M. Wakida  

Contributors:

Corazon Alupay

Elizabeth M. Carter

Macie L. Eng

Rashawn Gilmer

Kimberly Patton

Jenny K. Rienzo

Joy Viveros  

Barbara Wolf Ulloa

Erika Young

Melinda Micco

Karen Su

Maria Sandoval

Laura Ruiz

Karen Tseng  

Akari Miki

Gloria Rodriguez

Christina Gonzales

Susan Ito

Ana Castillo

Jacqueline Murphy

Jenny Rienzo

Laura Dickerson

Kimberly Patton

Lily Wong

Zaibun Pasha 

Purnima Manghnani

Charlene Harrison

Heather Herrera

Masao Suzuki

Melanie Hilario

Lucha Corpi

Nikky Finney

Laura Boyce

Janice Tubbs Bradford

Cheng Han Lee

Kerstin Carson

Bernice Zamora

Megan Micco

Victoria Dolores Heckler

Patricia Martin

Tina Ngan Hue Ly

Irene Tom

Nia Womack

Claudia De Anda  

Angela Rose

Spring Michele Diep

Tina Tom  

Khadijah Williams

Lolan Sevilla

Tracey Chin

Kanwarpal Dhaliwal

Tonda Case

Robbin Alfred

April Langley

Kris Yuriko Imada

Carlota Caulfield

Anabele Cornejo

Soo Jung Ko

Khadijah Luqman

Dozier Jackson

Cherileen Teasyatwho

Mary Helen Prime

Shahana Alam

Leona Beasley

Jinhee Melody Chung

LaSheiba Collins

Kristina Del Pino

Mario Estell II

Robert C. Gibson

April Houston

Keira Jaha

cate kuniyoshi

Carol Kussoy

Dionne M. Laffoon

Hoa Lu

Robin Mitchell

Kimberly Stanley

Carla Trujillo

Robin Galas  

Other Assistance:

Kaz Tsuruta

Brian Auerbach

T. C. Everett

Thanh Ho

Dawn Radcliffe

Solomon Hill

Carol Lennox