Screening "The Bombing of Osage Avenue" in Cuba

Though most widely known for her fiction and essays, Toni Cade Bambara’s work as a filmmaker and film critic is essential to understanding her Black feminist, anti-imperial politics. The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1987), which she made collaboratively with Louis Massiah, is arguably her most well-known film project, and it chronicles the Philadelphia bombing of the MOVE organization’s home on Mother’s Day in 1985. Using archival materials from Bambara’s papers, this talk highlights Bambara’s screening and circulation of The Bombing of Osage Avenue in Cuba in 1989 and unpacks the import of this seemingly obscure moment to our historical and contemporary understandings of Black Studies, Black Feminism and Black anti-imperialist media activism.