Bambara, Toni Cade | Elliott Butler-Evans (essay date 1989)
Elliott Butler-Evans (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Desire, Ambivalence, and Nationalist-Feminist Discourse in Bambara's Short Stories," in Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade B ambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 91-122.
[In the following essay, Butler-Evans explores B ambara's attempt to synthesize African-American nationalist and feminist ideologies in her short stories.]
The several ways in which Toni Cade Bambara's short stories were produced assured them a wide audience. Collected and presented as single texts, they were widely anthologized in feminist anthologies, particularly those produced by "women of color";1 and Bambara often read them aloud as "performance pieces" before audiences. Yet they have rarely been the object of in-depth critical attention.2
Bambara's role as storyteller resembles Walter Benjamin's description of...
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