Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions Quotes

“The limits of binary thinking are spooky enough”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

“there is an alternative wing in this country that is devoted to the notion of socially responsible cinema, that is interested in exploring the potential of cinema for social transformation, and these practitioners continue to struggle to tell the American story. That involves assuming the enormous tasks of reconstructing cultural memory, of revitalizing usable traditions of cultural practices, and of resisting the wholesale and unacknowledged appropriation of cultural items—such as music, language style, posture—by the industry that then attempts to suppress the roots of it—where it came from—in order to sustain its ideological hegemony. And so, there is no single American reality. There are versions, perspectives, that are specific to the historical experiences and cultural heritages of various communities in this country.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

“There is no American cinema; there are American cinemas.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

“I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience—readers and viewers—is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system—as to even what America is. We are taught to believe, for example, that there is an American literature, that there is an American cinema, that there is an American reality. There is no American literature; there are American literatures.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations