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 such a person, Benjamin's storyteller, a person "always rooted in the people," creates a narrative largely grounded in the oral tradition of his or her...