A joyous revolt: Toni Cade Bambara, writer and activist

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (05) ◽  
pp. 52-2397-52-2397
Keyword(s):  
Toni Cade Bambara

Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gary Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Do So

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.

The Daughters Debt: How Black Spirituality and Politics are Transforming the Televisual Landscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josslyn Luckett
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Black Spirituality

The spectrum of black women's spirituality in television has become nearly as diverse as the portraits of Afro-Atlantic spiritual practices that became central to key literary works of black feminist authors of the 1980s, such as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. While many are the spiritual and televisual daughters of the authors mentioned above, this essay argues that the appearance of this wider range of black women's spirituality and activism in episodic television owes its greatest debt to two films from the 1990s, Julie Dash's, Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve's Bayou (1997). I focus here on two shows which were themselves created by Black women feature film directors, Shots Fired (Gina Prince Bythewood with Reggie Rock Bythewood) and Queen Sugar (Ava DuVernay). I examine how characters like Pastor Janae (from Shots) and Nova Bordelon (from Sugar) use their spiritual practices in service of social justice, family, and community healing in ways that connect them to the women of Dash and Lemmons’ earlier films.

Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara ed. by Thabiti Lewis

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 520-524
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Casmier
Keyword(s):  
Toni Cade Bambara

Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara by Thabiti Lewis

Callaloo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
Pauline Baird
Keyword(s):  
Toni Cade Bambara

Black Media Matters

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Beckman
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Residential Neighborhood ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Black Media ◽  
The Military ◽  
The City

On May 13, 1985, the City of Philadelphia bombed the home of the radical black organization MOVE that was founded by John Africa in 1972. The military-style attack killed 11 occupants of the house, including 5 children, and destroyed almost two square blocks of a residential neighborhood, rendering 250 men, women and children homeless. In the midst of both contemporary protests responding to excessive police violence against African Americans and the military’s use of drone airpower, “Black Media Matters” returns our attention to the 1987 documentary, The Bombing of Osage Avenue, produced and directed by Louis Massiah, written and narrated by Toni Cade Bambara. Drawing on the archives of both Massiah and Bambara, this essay explores the film as a model of a media response to black political protest, death and suffering that resists spectacularization and oversimplification, and instead fosters historical awareness and critical reflection.

scholarly journals The Early Developments of Black Women’s Studies in the Lives of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde

2018 ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Conor Tomas Reed
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Youth Empowerment ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Life Lessons ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
June Jordan

<p>This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—widely recognized as among the most influential and prolific writers of 20th century cultures of emancipation. Their distinct yet entwined legacies—as socialist feminists, people’s poets and novelists, community organizers, and innovative educators—altered the landscapes of multiple liberation movements from the late 1960s to the present, and offer a striking example of the possibilities of radical women’s intellectual friendships. The internationalist reverberations of Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde are alive and ubiquitous, even if to some readers today in the Caribbean and Latin America, their names may be unfamiliar.<a title="" href="file:///C:/Users/natal/Documents/MEGA/1-REVISTAS/Anuario/Anuario%2030-2018/Dossier/02%20Articulo%20Conor.docx#_ftn1"><sup><sup>[</sup></sup></a></p><p>Bambara’s fiction centered Black and Third World women and children absorbing vibrant life lessons within societies structured to harm them. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, posed the question - “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” -to conjoin healing and resistance for a new embattled generation under President Reagan’s neoliberal shock doctrines that were felt worldwide. June Jordan’s salvos of essays, fiction, and poetry -including Things That I Do in the Dark, On Call, and Affirmative Acts - intervened in struggles around Black English, community control, police violence, sexual assault, and youth empowerment. Audre Lorde’s words are suffused across U.S. movements (and, increasingly, in the Caribbean and Latin America)- on signs, shirts, and memes, at #BlackLivesMatter and International Women’s Strike marches. Your silence will not protect you. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Revolution is not a one-time event. However, her voluminous legacy may risk becoming a series of slogans, “the Audre Lorde that reads like a bumper sticker.”</p><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div><p> </p></div></div>

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