Something More Powerful Than Skepticism

The purpose of this essay is to examine Toni Cade Bambara’s utopian thought, particularly the remarkably rich vocabulary she gave us for describing and analyzing the sensuality of social movement and the day-to-day practice of instantiating an instinct for freedom. Indeed, it is my view that Toni Cade Bambara was one of the great utopian thinkers of our time. Most people treat the utopian as an ideal future world, which at best provides a beacon of hope and at worst reflects an unrealistic fundamentalism bound to failure. But Bambara acted and wrote as if the utopian were a standpoint for comprehending and living in the here and now. Consequently, she gave us an extraordinary example of how to combine complex and acute social analysis with a vision of how some people have lived and do live today that is a model for how all of us could live. Without ever abandoning a strong sense of the past and the future, she always asked us to keep focused on where we live now, insisting that history is only ever made in that conjuncture. Bambara always insisted that the spirit of making history must be tied to, indeed generated from, an uncompromising diagnosis of the deathly apparatuses of power. Indeed, what seems most characteristic of Bambara’s work is the way in which she patiently yet urgently called her audiences and the people who inhabited her imagined worlds to see how the devastations and afflictions to which we are too routinely subjected require from us “something more powerful than skepticism.” ¹