Black People Are My Business

Thabiti Lewis is an associate professor of English and interim associate vice chancellor of academic affairs at Washington State University, Vancouver. He is also the editor of Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara and Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America. He writes extensively about masculinity, sports, and popular culture.

Lewis intervenes by re-establishing the boundaries and intergenerational building blocks of the Black Arts Movement by situating Bambara as a midwife for the creative legacy of the moment. He also reorients his readers to Bambara's role as foremother to some of the most acclaimed and well-read works by black women. This is essential for recognizing and placing Bambara within a more sustained discourse on the Black Arts Movement and Black women's evolution from that moment into their own creative renaissance. A necessary and overdue study. Lewis captures the significance of one of the most important figures in black and women's liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s in the U.S. Though Bambara has been undervalued as a revolutionary writer/activist/theorist of the Black Arts Movement, Lewis articulates in new ways, through an examination of her short stories and novels, the nature of her Black nationalist/feminist commitments and her 'spiritual wholeness aesthetic.' Lewis also underscores how Bambara practices 'nation building in her art' in unapologetic, creative, and brilliant ways. Lewis does a superb job of defending a unique and overdue analysis of Toni Cade Bambara's fiction. The technique of viewing Bambara's fiction through the lens of the spiritual wholeness aesthetic with its most frequent source in the Black Aesthetic Movement moves readers' attention from the dominant paradigm of viewing Bambara's fiction from a heavily womanist perspective to an interrogation of how Bambara's spiritual, political aesthetic reflects an interweaving of self and ethnic identity, community engagement and responsibility, a balancing of black male and black female identity and of how self-awareness or lack of it influences interactions within and outside the black community. 'Black People Are My Business' offers an insightful and empathetic analysis of Bambara's complete corpus-her popular short stories, her novels, and her nonfiction prose. Thabiti Lewis is an astute reader who illuminates the many ways in which Bambara was and is an indispensable writer. There can't be enough good books on Toni Cade Bambara, so Thabiti Lewis's 'Black People Are My Business' is a real gift. His close readings of Bambara's fiction adds an important layer to the conversation about Bambara and, as importantly, about reading/writing as a practice of liberation in African American literary studies.