Toni Cade Bambara Remembered by Donald P. Stone for #BambaraOnTFW #WeRESIST #BlackLivesMatter ...During Toni Cade Bambara’s generation, it was almost axiomatic that an artist would be an activist and place her art at the service of the masses of people. This then was Toni’s generation. The Black Arts Movement and the Black Power Movement dominated the cultural and political terrain. Social phenomena may sometimes explode before our very eyes and we are unable to discern its contours or to know its antecedents -The Negro Rural School Movement. Such certainly has been the case with our literary artists. Their numbers have expanded well beyond what one might have expected. Toni Cade Bambara is one of the people responsible for this large expansion of Black writers, male and female, published, self-published, and unpublished. Believe me, they are out there with excellent novels, short stories, biographies, poems, and non-fiction. And because of Toni and the Movement she was part of, they can be writers without the same demands placed on them for activism as that previous generation of artist-activists. However, they should and must pay homage to the aesthetic that was set forth by our bonded ancestors in their development of the African American Spiritual and that has threaded itself down through our most important cultural and political achievements (the blues, jazz, Negro Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Black Power Movement). That aesthetic demands that our quest for truth and beauty be linked to our struggles for freedom, justice, and equality—linked to our social reality. That is another aspect of the universality that our art demands...
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 13:14:39 +0000
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