In This Issue/Before and After

September 11, 2001 was a line of demarcation that constructed recent history in a linear progression from Before to After. I write this statement After. All else in this issue was written long Before four commercial airplanes and their unwitting passengers were used as weapons of mass destruction in New York, Washington, and western Pennsylvania. The need to identify the significance of that date speaks to the dilemma of the quarterly publication. Our response to world events is, of necessity, historical, rather than immediate. But we can no longer read something from Before without the intrusion of that date and its aftermaths-still so precariously ongoing. Thus I mention the mundane specificity of today's date, October 30, 2001, because as you read, it has the potential to resonate with new developments, new contexts, and other points of encounter that I cannot anticipate. Many of our authors asked to revise their words. Unfortunately, deadlines did not allow for that. In future issues we will address recent events more directly. As with the 1967 photo of Tokyo in the smog that was on the cover of the Fall 2001 issue, which eerily anticipated images of smoke rising from the ashes of lower Manhattan, changed context can offer new relevance well beyond specific authorial or editorial intentions. In examining the meanings of the Muslim woman in black who wears the chador, enacted as a terrorist by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, Igor Zabel could not know the intensity of response these images and his analysis may now provoke.