Refuting Xenophobia.

 @moncelldurdenintangibleroots

1 year ago

I know it was born here but anthropologically speaking Its deep rooted structures are found in African cultural retentions. If you don't understand or haven't studied anthropology you don't realize that I agree with you. I just understand how what we do here in America is tethered to African traditions, in relation to form,  function, etc., and understanding the significant units (aesthetics) that make up form and function as well the morphology of cultural practices through migration. But again if you haven't studied anthropology you may not appreciate what I'm sharing or saying. However, please provide me with your structural analysis as to why black American culture is not tethered to African retention. Give me the documentation, the articles, books, etc that support your statement. You can read chronicling cultures, by Robert Kemper and Anya Peterson Royce, signifying, sanctifying, & slam dunking by Gena Dagel Caponi, Africanisms in American culture by Joseph E Holloway, Migrations of Gesture by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, Black Culture and black consciousness, by Lawrence W. Levine, African Rhythm and African Sensibility by John Miller Chernoff, The Spirituals and the Blues by James H Cone, The Making of African America by Ira Berlin. Perhaps these books will help you grasp the bigger picture. So, Bro, you stop and do some real research, present real evidence to support your claim, because I can prove everything I have to share and it's supported by amazing scholarship in the field. Bring your evidence then we can have a real conversation. Thank you for your comment, have a blessed day

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@moncelldurdenintangibleroots

1 year ago

Agreed. Once again you are missing my point. Black Americans have created gospel through their expression of psalmody and adding lyrics that spoke to the agrarian labor. This also steep in the movement of the ring shout that helped African cultivate a sense of community ring shouts turned into field hollers, which turned into praise houses which turned into churches. I personally don't subscribe to Black as a permanate defining label because black is a construct. The Largest percentage of my family lineage comes from Moscogee Indian on this continent and Mozambique on the mother land. To abrogate my lineage just because I was born here seems wrong to me. but I digress, yes "black" Ameircans created all those things here, hip hop, rock n roll, the blues etc which really developed after the emancipation because before then songs focused on negro spirituals which were coded language about escaping and singing about free after. Blues came out of being thinking they were free, but life got worse hence the blues.

The word Jazz can be found in many languages in Africa; Jasi with the Mandinka people means out of character, Bantu speaking people "Jaja" means to make dance, Wolof speaking people "Yees" means the same to dance, Temne people "Yas", meaning to be lively, energetic applied to music dance even sex. The work Hip is connected to a wolof word meaning to open one’s eyes, some believe would be spelled Xippi or hippi check John Leland book on the history of the word Hip. Geneva Smitherman author of Talking and Testifying. We have created new dances here as well, the dances are new, but the structure of the dance is Africanist aesthetics, like orientation to the earth, poly rhythms and polycentrism, percussiveness, carrying something in one’s hand, etc. See my point is what we have create here which does speak to our unique experiences in America are still connected to the African retention. Baptism in church for another example is a connection to the Yoruba practice and Orisha ritual that recognizes the marriage between yemaya goddess of the sea and Obatala father of many Orisha. Senior usher board members two stepping down the aisle in church come from the ring shout. 

Ragtime music was based on "black" folks playing Philip Sousa music with an african sense of time and rhythm. Syncopating the music. So, the "time" was different hence march time music like Sousas Stars and Strips but musicians like Scott Joplin Africanized the beat created Ragtime. 

Anthropology as a field has not focused on African American practices which is why I did. My research focuses on the deep-rooted structures of our characteristics of behavior. I hope this little bit helps you all to understand the connection are rich which is all I'm saying. That we have created new things here but in the deep structure those things are fundamentally tethered to our ancestors who were brought here for hundreds of years. and with them came their cultural practices which and over time became what we have today. Again, thank you for the comment. Blessings

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@moncelldurdenintangibleroots

1 year ago

 @vstpluginsonicxtc  Thank you PluginSonic. So, what are your thoughts on the connection of the Ghanaian dance the Adowa to the Camel-walk, and the Charleston forming form the Yankadi from Guinea, that I offer in the video? I wouldn’t say crafted rather honoring both, what was drafted here and those retentions that survived. As far as the word hip It was British Linguist David Dalby that traced the likely origin of the hip to Wolof speaking people. Wolof being a phonetic language no one is sure how it would be spelled as it has a glottal sound, so the “H” is suggested. However, most scholars like Dalby, Leland, Smitherman, Holloway agree on the meaning “To open one’s eyes, or be aware of” in the same way we use the word. In the Jazz era it was Hep meaning you know what was going on, you were a Hep-Cat, or Hip in Hip Hop. Hop in an American context other than being a verb has meant to dance in the case of going to a sock-hop in the 1950s.

Addressing English, yes, we know that English is a bastardized German, mixed up with Celtic languages. When the Anglish what some call the Anglo-Saxon went to Britain to help fight off the Romans. But the language in England was once RP Received Pronunciation, which has changed over time. What we speak here now is SAE Standard American English. It would take more than a comment post to go into Phonological and grammatical structures so what I will add is that Africans had their own languages and systems of sounds, and we find the modification of African linguistic retentions throughout the Diaspora. As linguist Dr. Erni Smith suggest we can see these retentions are noticeable when the mother tongue attempts to speak a new language. In the case of voice and voiceless some consonants clusters are spoken while others are not. Africans of the Bantu, Niger, and Congo learning to speak English would demonstrate homogeneous voicing meaning instead of saying “Fast” the (FT and ST) configuration are both voice “Black” folks will say fass, or “Past” we will say, pass but in heterogenous voicing we will say, a voice and voiceless configuration for example the word “Think” (NK) N is voice and K is voiceless, Jump (MP) configuration M is Voice and P is voiceless. AAE or AAVE.

As far as my family roots I only brought that up to say that I will not negate my ancestry; and in so doing I would refer to myself as Afro-indigenous before “black” as I already mentioned black is a construct and is not a definitive identity trait.

As to Scott Joplin Ragging the beat literally meant syncopating the beat which was done in Africa not in Europe. Ragtime was developed primarily by African Americans; It combined African based syncopation and polyrhythms with European music like John Philip Sousa march time music. It fused the marching band sound of Sousa with the Syncopation and improvisation of African music for a hybrid that swept the nation in the late 1890s. Along with Ragtime music came the animal dance craze with dances like the Camel-walk, Bunny hug, Grizzly bear, Turkey Trot, Snake Hip, Joplin songs Combination was inspired by Sousa “The Thunder march”, and the Great Crush Collision was inspired musically by the Sousa “Washington post march” and  the Panic of 1893, when fear of an economic depression lead to a spectacle of crashing two trains to raise money.

I’m curious as to why American “Black” people are so afraid to acknowledge that many of our retentions come from the motherland. And acknowledging that doesn’t take away from what we’ve created here. It’s says that what we do is not 60 years or even 400 years old, its much older and deeply rooted and rich with ancestral knowledge.

“Black and blackness are themselves signs of diaspora, of a cosmopolitanism that African subjects did not choose but from which they necessarily reimagined themselves.” Moncia L. Miller

I’m not sure what you’ve been reading but there is plenty of research. Here are a few books the check out. Enjoy and thank you for the correspondence

• The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America. Of which I have two articles in by MWalimu J. Shujaa and Kenya J. Shujaa

• Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific

• Funk: the music, the people and the rhythm of the one by Rickey Vincent

• Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance by Thomas F. DeFrantz

• The Rhythms of Black Folk: Race, Religion, and Pan-Africanism by Jon Michael Spencer

• Cool Pose: The dilemmas of black manhood in America by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson

• The Dozens by Elijah Wald

• What makes that Black: the African American aesthetic in American expressive culture by Luana

• The Creolization of American Culture by Christopher J. Smith

• How Europe underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

• Bodies in Dissent by Daphne A. Brooks

• Cuba and its Music: From the drums to the mambo by Ned Sublette

• Slaves to Fashion Monica L. Miller

• Dancing Wisdom Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé by Yvonne Daniel

• The spirituals and the Blues by James H. Cone

• The Drama of Nommo by Paul Carter Harrison

• Music in the United States by H. Wiley Hitchcock

• Black Indians: A hidden heritage by William Loren Katz

• An Afro Indigenous history of the United States by Kyle T. Mays

• An Indigenous people history of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

• Blood Memory by Dayton and Ken Burns

• Afro-Latin America 1800-2000 by George Reid Andrews

• Ring Shout Wheel About: The racial politics of music, and dance in north American culture by Katrina Dyonne Thompson

• Hoedowns, Reels and Frolics: Roots and branches of Southern Appalachian Dance by Phil Jamison

• Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

• National Rhythms, African Roots: the deep history of Latin American popular dance by John Charles Chasteen

• Black Dance From 1619-to today by Lynne Fauley Emery

• Afro-Cuban jazz by Scott Yanow

• From Afro-Cuban rhythms to latin Jazz by Raul A. Fernandez

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@moncelldurdenintangibleroots

1 year ago

 @vstpluginsonicxtc  I would like to add for you and anyone else that needs a bit of guidance. "Black" Americans are not descendants of slaves, we are descendants of African people. Slaves is not a group of people, unless perhaps we are talking about Slavic people; as the word slave comes from Slavic. Africans were enslaved. Just because a person may go to prison, their genotype and phenotype doesn't change. They are simply a person who has been imprisoned.

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@moncelldurdenintangibleroots

1 year ago

I don’t think the people who identify with FBA understand what cultural retention, and deep-rooted structure means. Somehow you think I’m saying, the music and dance in America was created in Africa and that’s not what anyone is saying. The deep-rooted structures, characteristics of behavior, and retentions are of the Africanist aesthetic.You realize that the dances, music, foods, religion, etc., throughout the Southern Islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Brazil, etc., are all rooted in African retentions as well as some European customs. The African retentions are not just found in America; they are found throughout the African-diaspora. Brazilian Capoeira has roots in the Angola Ostrich dance, the Berimbau developed from the earth bow, the roots of Cuban music is from Spain and West Africa, etc. Just as Africans brought their cultures and customs to America, they brought them to the Southern Islands first. And again, that doesn't mean that new things and approaches were not created throughout the Americas. Hip Hop, Blues, Gospel, lindy hop, jazz, etc., was created in America but has its roots in Africa.