Afro-American Literature: The Analysis of Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

It is said that Afro-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United states by writers of African descent. Today, Afro-American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature. In broad terms, Afro-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. This qualitative study analyzes a short story entitled Gorilla, My Lovewritten by a female Afro-American writer, Toni Cade Bambara. The analysis of the study aims at answering the three problem formulation: (1) states the literariness of the text (2) explains how the literariness of the text play as a means to symbolize a “broader” text (the universe) and (3) writes the proof of mental evidences taken from the text. In analyzing the short story, this study uses Sociology of Literature and Psychology of Literature. The two theories help readers understanding the theme of the short story by reading the explanation about how the narrator of the story set the plot. This study uses narrative as its approach since this is a literary study where a short story is analyzed through its narrative structure. The conclusion of the study provides the proof of its research benefits: giving information to readers about the following: (1) all about Afro-American literature plus its life-experience, family-values, etc. (2) how a literary work can connect its readers to their life and (3) an understanding that a reading-act strengthens the definition that a literary work is as a portrait of human experience.

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

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.

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

<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">^{^[}</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>

Epilogue

Despite the fact that Black feminism, as a critical locus of Black women’s twentieth century knowledge production, has become a fully institutionalized field of academic specialization since the late 1970s, the contention of this book has been that there is still a requisite and tacit failure to take Black women’s work, as thinkers and theorists on broader questions affecting Black people, seriously. Yes, Black feminist women’s arguments about the centrality of gender to racial concerns have gained major academic currency, as evidenced by the broad use of intersectional discourse in numerous fields and disciplines. And yes, the new Black Lives Matter Movement, particularly as conceived by Garza, Tometi, and Cullors has made Black feminist politics the currency of Black radical thought. But the fact that Alicia Garza’s comments written in the second decade of the twenty-first century, sound eerily similar to commentary from Anna Julia Cooper writing in the nineteenth century, and Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks writing in the twentieth suggests that not enough has changed.

Black Media Matters

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.