I am not only honored but instructed by these essays. Let me begin with Jean Franco's essay and acknowledge her moving expression of solidarity: “coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire[.] Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.”