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Book Reviews -Christopher B. Steiner, Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the spirit: African and Afro-American art and philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983. xvii + 317 pp. -P.C. Emmer, Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic empires: the network of trade and revolution, 1713-1826. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1983. xxiii + 348 pp. -Jerome S. Handler, Roger D. Abrahams ,After Africa: extracts from British travel accounts...in the British West Indies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. 444 pp., John F. Szwed (eds) -Franklin W. Knight, Ken Post, Strike the iron: a colony at war: Jamaica, 1939-1945. 2 volumes. Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press, 1981. xiv + 567 pp. -Mary Turner, Christine Bolt ,Anti-slavery, religion and reform: essays in memory of Roger Anstey. Folkstone, Kent, England: William Dawson and Sons; Hampden CT: Archon Books, 1980. xii + 377 pp., Seymour Drescher (eds) -Carl C. Campbell, Mary Turner, Slaves and missionaries: the disintegration of Jamaican slave society, 1781-1834. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. 223 pp. -Ransford W. Palmer, Hugh N. Dawes, Public finance and economic development: spotlight on Jamaica. Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. xvi + 147 pp. -Michéle Baj Strobel, Wellesley A. Baird, Guyana gold: the story of Wellesley A. Baird, Guyana's greatest miner. With an end essay by Kathleen J. Adams. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1982. 185 pp. -Charles V. Carnegie, Bonham C. Richardson, Caribbean Migrants: environment and human survival on St. Kitts and Nevis. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983. xiii + 209 pp. -Keith F. Otterbein, John Bregenzer, Tryin' to make it: adapting to the Bahamas. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. viii + 88 pp. -Wayne S. Smith, Louis A. Perez, Cuba between empires, 1878-1902. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. xx + 490 pp. -Sergio Roca, Susan Schroeder, Cuba: a handbook of historical statistics. Boston: G.K. Hall, International Historical Statistical Series, 1982. xlii + 589 pp. -James W. Wessman, H. Hoetink, The Dominican people 1850-1900: notes for a historical sociology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1982, 243 pp. -Frank Penã Pérez, Maria Rosario Sevilla Soler, Santo Domingo: tierra de frontera, 1750-1800. Seville: Escula de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1980. xx + 502 pp. -Ricardo Campos Orta, Francisco A. Scarano, Inmigración y clases sociales en el Puerto Rico Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 04:59:43AM via free access del siglo XIX. Rio Pedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1981. -Roberto Márquez, David William Foster, Puerto Rican literature: a bibliography of secondary sources. Westport CT This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 04:59:43AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 2 I 3 BOOK REVIEWS Flash of the spirit: African and Afro-American art and philosophy. ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON. New York: Random House, 1983. xvii + 317 pp. (Cloth USS 19.95) Within the larger context of art and aesthetics in the Americas, the contributions made by peoples of African descent have gone largely unnoticed or unappreciated by serious scholars in the fields of both anthropology and (especially) art history. For this reason, Robert Farris Thompson's recent study of Afro-American art and philosophy — a work conceived with sensitivity, and presented in provocative prose — is a welcome addition to a decidedly impoverished area of research. However, from a meth- odological perspective the book is, on the whole, disappointing, and fails to attain the quality and originality of the author's earlier contributions to the study of Yoruba art and culture (1974; 1976). The book's methodological and conceptual shortcomings, to- gether with its intrepidly daring theoretical assertions, raise im- portant questions concerning the nature of scholarship in what is inevitably a highly emotional, political, and ideologically charged area of investigation. A critical reading of Flash of the spirit leaves this reviewer with serious reservations about both the form and content of the work. The purpose of the book, the author tells us, is to identify "specifically Yoruba, Kongo[,] Dahomean, Mande, and Ejagham in- fluences on the art and philosophies of black people throughout the Americas" (pp. xiv-xv). In so doing, he proposes to go beyond earlier works, which have "shown [only] generalized African Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 04:59:43AM via free access 214 BOOK REVIEWS cultural unities linking the women and men of West and Central Africa to black people in the New World" (p. xiv). While seeking to identify specific cultural traits linking Africa to the Americas, Thompson skillfully skirts a problematic issue characteristic of the brief intellectual history of such research, namely the obvious difficulty of distilling from the multifarious societies of the sub- Saharan continent a single "African" culture. In effect, however, it would seem that the author has simply replaced Herskovits's schema of culture areas (1924) with a more fashionable concept of ethnic groups, thereby departing less radically from the con- tributions of a half century ago than one would have hoped for in a book that advertises itself in the jacket blurb as a "landmark of scholarship." Flash of the spirit is comprised of five chapters, each devoted to New World manifestations of a particular African "aesthetic tradition." The first chapter deals with what Thompson refers to as Yoruba traditions in the Old and New World. Relying on his expertise in Yoruba art and culture, the author identifies similar- ities between the ways in which the Yoruba of West Africa reflect upon and create their art and their social world, and the ways in which certain peoples in the Americas (especially those of African descent in New York City, Miami, Havana, Matanzas, Recife, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro) conceive of and act upon things in artistic, religious, and social domains. Thompson argues that because art holds a privileged place in Yoruba society, its reaffir- mation in the arts of black America is understandable and indeed to be expected. In the author's words: ... sheer artlessness may bring a culture down but a civilization like that of the Yoruba, and the Yoruba-Americans, pulsing with ceaseless creativity richly stabilized by precision and control, will safeguard the passage of its people through the storms of time [p. 97]. Though filled with tremendous appreciation and sympathetic perception for aesthetic continuities between Yoruba art of West Africa and Yoruba-looking art in the Americas, Thompson's analysis is seriously flawed by its failure to identify, or even to broach, the historical (as opposed to metaphysical) links which connect the two artforms in space and time. What he offers is a Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 04:59:43AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 2 I 5 highly thought-provoking analysis of the nature of a shared Yoruba ontology stretching across the Atlantic. What he fails to provide is the causative basis for such a connection: thefait accompli thus being granted more analytical weight than the processes by which Yoruba art and philosophy were "transplanted" to the New World. The second chapter, based on one of Thompson's earlier works (1981), is an investigation of Kongo art and religion in the Americas. Here, Thompson argues that "Kongo civilization and art were not obliterated in the New World: they resurfaced in the coming together, here and there, of numerous slaves from Kongo and Angola" (p. 104). Selecting four Kongo artistic and sacred traditions — the cosmogram, minkisi charms, the grave, and bottle trees — Thompson identifies what he perceives to be their New World counterparts. In this section we are also introduced to James Hampton and Henry Dorsey, two twentieth-century Afro-American artists. Thompson explores these individuals' artistic creations, focusing primarily on the Kongo traditions which seem to inform them. Again, there is no distinction made between the art and philo- sophies of Africa which date to the era of the Atlantic slave trade — the material which, according to Thompson's argument, would have formed part and parcel of the cultural baggage transported by African men and women to the New World — and the art and philosophies of contemporary Africa. He writes, for instance, Like the spectral pulleys, wheels, and switches on a modern Kongo drum, he [Henry Dorsey] brought together a liquor jug, the blades of an electric fan, and a metal disk to form a material constellation of objects ... [pp. 147-50]. What links these two forms of aesthetic expression is left unclear to the reader, save perhaps their being joined by the "flash of the spirit" — that visual and philosophic stream of creativity and imagination which somehow traverses the Atlantic owing no allegiance to boundaries of space and time. Haitian vodun, the topic of the third chapter, is described by Thompson as "a vibrant, sophisticated synthesis of the traditional religions of Dahomey, Yorubaland, and Kongo with an infusion Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 04:59:43AM via free access 2l6 BOOK REVIEWS of Roman Catholicism" (p. 163). Here, in a sense, Thompson is more sensitive than elsewhere in the book to what he terms the "reblending," or what Mintz and Price (1976) — using a tech- nical linguistic analogy — have called the "remodelling," of various African and European cultures which were brought to- gether in the New World. Yet, hidden behind this apparent openness to an acceptance of the complexity of cultural heritage there lies a curious insistence on dissecting the product of such synthesis, in this case vodun, into its putatively separate, distinct roots. Hence, we find that the chapter is divided into sections labeled "Dahomean Influences on Haitian Sacred Art" and "Kongo Influences on Haitian Sacred Art." Here again, this reviewer finds little or no departure from Herskovits's work on the subject published in the 1930S.