earticle

영어

With Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara has been acclaimed as one of the triumvirate of contemporary African American women writers emerging since 1960s. In The Salt Eaters (1980), Bambara explores the effects of African American civil rights movements on African Americans by tracing the historical changes within the movements. The novel identifies self-transformation and wholeness as the missing elements in the progressive movements of 1960s and the early 1970s. The novel also suggests that to achieve of the goals of African American political activism, African Americans have to respond to the new challenges of the last quarter of the 20th century, including increasing fragmentation, endangered environments, and the threat of nuclear contamination. In this article, I introduce a glocal perspective to Bambara scholarship by focusing on the ways in which Bambara connects the local and the global in The Salt Eaters. Providing a glocal reading of The Salt Eaters, I discuss how Bambara reflects African American political activism in the particular context of contemporary U.S. and then how she connects the particular experience of contemporary African Americans to environmental injustice and ecological consciousness which have both local and global dimensions.