African Art in Motion by Robert Farris Thompson

If you missed the Ballet Russe and Stravinsky’s Rite in Paris at the start of the century, don’t worry. The city has become a color organ of cultures. Right now major cultural collisions are taking place in New York. Whatever else blacks may have been denied, the airwaves are theirs. Theirs are the rhythms shaking this century.

“Music is the realm of pervasive black influence. Then the priest took out his American Automobile Association card and called Triple-A.īiden's Envoy to Haiti Resigns in Protest of Administration's 'Inhumane' Deportation of Refugees Thompson relates that the priest opened the hood, then borrowed some rum from Thompson to make a rum mist that he blew out of his mouth over the overheated engine (it’s a Yoruba gesture for cooling things down). For example, he tells how a high priest of the Yoruba religion in New York drove up to visit him in New Haven. The next important step in Thompson’s development was a Ford Foundation fellowship to go to Yorubaland (Nigeria) for fieldwork he has gone back and forth between Yale and Africa 14 times. I have spent my life like a literary critic,” he says, “trying to marshal all the apposite texts to decode ‘The Newspaper Shirt Mambo.'”

Those Afro-Cuban rhythms are hot, acrid and bumping. If you were Yoruba, and taken in slavery in the nineteenth century, chances were you’d wind up in Cuba or northeastern Brazil. “These are some of the strands in the textile: salsa and reggae share the mambo impulse, and the mambo component in turn emerged from Cuba in the late 1930s.

African Art in Motion by Robert Farris Thompson