Divesting From Hollywood and State Narrative: On Toni Cade Bambara & Gloria Naylor With Randi Gill-Sadler

In this episode we speak with Professor Randi Gill-Sadler about various published and unpublished works of writers and filmmakers Toni Cade Bambara and Gloria Naylor.

Randi Gill-Sadler is a teacher, scholar, and writer. She received her PhdD in English and her graduate certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Florida. Her research and teaching interests include 20th century African American and Afro-Caribbean women's literature, U.S. Cultures of Imperialism, and theories of Black diasporic relation and anticolonialism. Her work has been published in Feminist Formations, Small Axe , Radical History Review, and Oxford American magazine. She is currently writing her first book which revisits the Black women's literary renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s to explore how Black women writers like Paule Marshall, June Jordan, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara reckoned with African Americans' growing conscription into U.S. imperial exploits in their fiction, poetry, and film.

For this discussion Josh talks to Professor Gill-Sadler about how Bambara and Naylor navigated the academy, spaces of cultural production, while maintaining anti-imperialist politics, and putting their skills to work for local movements and causes, while also connecting the local to the international.

Just a quick note that on the video side of things, due to a pipe leak my studio has been out of commission and will continue to be for about the next month. That’s why we haven’t been hosting livestreams recently. We hope to have that resolved by sometime in January and have plans to continue using the video form. But in the meantime we’ll be releasing audio episodes. You can catch up on the 139 livestreams we hosted there over the past year at YouTube.com/@MAKCapitalism

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This episode is edited & produced by Aidan Elias. Music, as always, is by Televangel

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For another conversation on the Atlanta Missing & Kidnapped Children’s Case (in the context of the context of the moral panic about kidnapping in the late 70's and 1980's), see our conversation with Paul Renfro on his book Stranger Danger.