"Black people are my business" : Toni Cade Bambara's practices of liberation

Resource Information

The work "Black people are my business" : Toni Cade Bambara's practices of liberation represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Anaheim Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

"Black people are my business" : Toni Cade Bambara's practices of liberation

Title remainder

Toni Cade Bambara's practices of liberation

Statement of responsibility

Thabiti Lewis

Creator

• Lewis, Thabiti

Author

• Lewis, Thabiti

Subject

• Bambara, Toni Cade
• Social justice

Language

eng

Summary

""Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939-1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monograph that focuses on Bambara's unique approach and important literary contribution to 1970s and 1980s African American literature. It explores her unique nationalist, feminist, Marxist, and spiritualist ethos, which cleared space for many innovations found in black women's fiction. Divided into five chapters, Lewis's study relies on Bambara's voice (from interviews and essays) to craft a "spiritual wholeness aesthetic"-a set of principles that comes out of her practices of liberation and entail family, faith, feeling, and freedom-that reveals her ability to interweave ethnic identity, politics, and community engagement and responsibility with the impetus of balancing black male and female identity influences and interactions within and outside the community. One key feature of Bambara's work is the concentration on women as cultural workers whereby her notion of spiritual wholeness upends what has become a scholarly distinction between feminism and black nationalism. Bambara's fiction situates her as a pivotal voice within the Black Arts Movement and contemporary African American literature. Bambara is an understudied and important artistic voice whose aversion to playing it safe both personified and challenged the boundaries of black nationalism and feminism. "Black People Are My Business" is a wonderful addition to any reader's list, especially those interested in African American literary and cultural studies"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

303.3/72

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography