Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara

<p><em>Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara</em> reveals an artist and activist whose work deftly negotiates boundaries of feminism nationalism and film. The intimacy of these collaborations or conversations between Bambara (1939-1995) and her interviewers provides an excellent and necessary resource for those interested in scholarly approaches to her fiction especially her novels <em>The Salt Eaters</em> and the posthumously published <em>Those Bones Are Not My Child</em> and her acclaimed short story collection <em>Gorilla My Love</em>. The collection reveals the passion humor and real-life experiences of the woman who through her editing of the groundbreaking anthology of black women's writing <em>The Black Woman</em> and contributions to the documentary <em>W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices</em> changed perceptions of African American culture in the modern era.</p><p>The interviews present a woman who saw herself as -a teacher who writes a social worker who writes a youth worker who writes a mother who writes.- Bambara viewed herself as a cultural worker for oppressed people whose job as an artist was making in her words -revolution irresistible.- Indeed her fiction champions the working class and -average folk - both of whom she felt were made invisible by mainstream American society.</p><p>The volume also displays Bambara's passionate criticism of radicalism and revolutionary philosophies that were structured by patriarchal sexist and heterosexual-centric paradigms. Her willingness to challenge her own ideals as well as those that conflicted with them marks her as one of the most forceful black writers of her era.</p>