1984 Article Excerpt About Robert Farris Harris, An American Historian & Writer Specializing In African & African Diaspora Folk Cultures

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post provides an excerpt of a 1984 Rolling Stone magazine article about Robert Farris Thompson entitled "Robert Farris Thompson: Canons of the Cool". Robert Farris Thompson is a White American historian and writer specialising in the art and cultures of Africa and African Diaspora Folk Cultures.*

An excerpt from the Wikipedia page for Robert Farris Thompson is given in the beginning of this post.

The content of this post is presented for linguistic, cultural, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Robert Farris Thompson for his life's legacy and thanks to the author of the article that is being quoted.

Note: I publish excerpts of articles or of hard to find books in this pancocojams blog to increase awareness about those writings and to encourage people to read them in their entirety.

*Most of this sentence identifying Robert Farris Thompson is taken from his Wikipedia page. However, I added the words "and cultures" to that sentence. I also changed the term "Afro-Atlantic" that is given in that Wikipedia page to "African Diaspora Folk Cultures" as that term is a better fit for me in describing the range and depth of Thompson's interest and scholarly accomplishments.

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INFORMATION ABOUT ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Farris_Thompson
"Robert Farris Thompson (born December 30, 1932, El Paso, Texas[1]) is an American historian and writer specialising in the art of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world. He has been a member of the faculty at Yale University since 1965 and currently serves as the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art.[2] Thompson coined the term "black Atlantic" in his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy - the expanded subject of Paul Gilroy's book The Black Atlantic.[3]

He lived in the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria for many years while he conducted his research of Yoruba arts history. He is affiliated with the University of Ibadan and frequented Yoruba village communities. Thompson has studied the African arts of the diaspora in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and several Caribbean islands...

Career at Yale
In 1955, Thompson received his B.A. from Yale University. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he continued his studies at Yale, where he received his Masters in 1961 and his Ph.D in 1965.[4]

Having served as Master of Timothy Dwight College from 1978 until 2010, he was the longest serving master of a residential college at Yale. Thompson is one of America's most prominent scholars of African art, and has presided over exhibitions of African art at the National Gallery in Washington D. C.. He is one of the longest-serving alumni of Yale.

Publications and areas of study
Beginning with an article on Afro-Cuban dance and music (published in 1958), Thompson has dedicated his life to the study of art history of the Afro-Atlantic world.[4] His first book was Black Gods and Kings, which was a close reading of the art history of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria (population of approximately 40 million).[4] Other published works include- African Art in Motion, Flash of the Spirit (1983), Face of the Gods, and Tango: The Art History of Love.[4] Thompson also published an introduction to the diaries of Keith Haring. Some of his works have even been translated into German, Portuguese, French and Flemish.[4] Additionally, Thompson also studies the art of Guillermo Kuitca and Jos� Bedia, and has been anthologized 15 times.[4]�...

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ARTICLE EXCERPT:
From http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/canons-of-the-cool-19841122
"Robert Farris Thompson: Canons of the Cool"

The Yale professor was destined to become another stuffy intellectual � until he danced the mambo

By Fred Iseman, November 22, 1984
..."Robert Farris Thompson and I have come down to Haiti on a 10:30 a.m. flight from New York to pass the weekend with Andr� Pierre and with Madame Nerva, a vodun priestess. Thompson is an art historian, a tenured professor at Yale and master of Timothy Dwight College there. I am a former student of his, come along to watch Bob make what he calls "a little sounding" � "a little sondage." Andr� Pierre is the Haitian Fra Angelico, a vodun cleric whose canvases hang in the Haitian national museum; copies of his work fill airport postcard racks.

[...]

White of skin, white of hair and white of origins, education and society, Robert Farris Thompson fell in love with black music, black art and blackness 30 years ago and has spent his entire career in the grips of that particular passion. Following an instinct aroused by a mambo overheard in 1950, Thompson has learned fluent Ki-Kongo, Yoruba, French, Spanish and Portuguese and is learning a score of Creole and tribal languages; wandered, with pygmies, Zaire's Ituri forest; become a vodun acolyte; written four books on West African religion, philosophy and art; and organized two major exhibitions at Washington's National Gallery. He has also become, by dancing in an indigo costume embroidered with seashells taken from the gizzards of dead crocodiles, a "junior-varsity member of the Basinjon Society," a Cameroun tribal agency for controlling lightning and other natural forces.

Incorporating anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology and what Thompson calls "guerrilla scholarship" (i.e., "We'll let the fud-duds footnote their way across that"), Thompson's career is bent toward a single end: the learned advocacy of black Atlantic civilization. He spends his life pursuing the scholarly thrill of making coherent and meaningful what is misunderstood as random, superficial or obscure. As an art historian will extract from basilica floor plans a comprehension of the medieval mind, or from late Roman statuary an understanding of the empire's decline, Thompson works from the iconography of salsa, dance steps, clothes, sculpture, gesture and slang to a definition of blackness. He loves to show how sophisticated the "primitive" really is. As archeologist, he brings artifacts to life; as critic, he deciphers them; and as true believer, he promotes their artistic and spiritual worth.

[...]

Bob Thompson lectures his class like a fundamentalist preacher rousing a congregation, knees bent, microphone cocked and wire trailing behind him. He walks amid the 200 students overflowing the Street Hall auditorium out into the corridor. Thompson's fall course, HoA 379a, is titled "The Structure of the New York Mambo: Microcosm of Black Creativity." Onstage a tape player emits pygmy yodeling; from the vacant lectern hangs a map of West African tribal dominions; and on the screen flash slides of Harlem, pygmies, fabrics of syncopated patterns and Kongo-influenced funerary sculpture from North Carolina graveyards. "Why," Thompson asks, "are black people so sassy?"

The answer begins with the etymology of the phrase "get down." It moves to the Yoruba concepts of cool (itutu) and command (�she); lateral versus sagittal walking; the aesthetics of drumming; the significance of offbeat phrasing; call-and-response; and finally Muhammad Ali. Thompson's voice switches to a mock-Groton lilt to declaim a litany of African influences:

"A lot of our slang was created by people thinking in Yoruba and Ki-Kongo while speaking in English. The basic sounds of agreement and disagreement, uh-huh and unh-unh, are pure West African. Funky is Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, 'positive sweat.' Boogie comes from Ki-Kongo mbugi, meaning 'devilishly good.' Jazz and jisn probably derive from the same Ki-Kongo root dinza, meaning 'to ejaculate.' Mojo comes from Ki-Kongo for 'soul'; juke as in jukebox from Mande-kan for 'bad'; and Babalu-Aye � as in disc jockey Babalu � is pure and simple Yoruba for 'Father and Master of the Universe.'

"Most of our ballroom dancing is Africanized," he continues, "the rhumba, the tango, even tap-dancing and the Lindy. Fried chicken is African. And J. Press patchwork shorts may be related to an African fabric. Even cheerleading incorporates some apparent Kongo gestures: left hand on hip, right hand raised twirling a baton. It worked its way up through New Orleans Vodun Rara bands into the Dallas Cowboys' half-time show."

"Let me give you all the pieces that ignited," Thompson explains, sitting in a campus restaurant. "I grew up in Texas; I was crazy about boogie. I wasn't a football player or anything, and I realize now that any elements of attractiveness I had for girls then were both musical and black-influenced. My senior year at prep school, I went to Mexico City on a trip. There was this mambo � Mexico City was awash in mambo � I heard waiters humming it, I heard it on the lips of gas-station attendants, I heard it in the background when talking to the hotel operator on the phone. It was my first full shot of African music: all-out black polyphony, mambo multimetrics. A stunning woman stopped in front of me in a cafe; she heard this music, and I heard her say to her companion, 'But darling, it's such a different beat.'"

Thompson's newest book, Flash of the Spirit, explains the roots of African influence in the New World. It serves as a sort of Baedeker to funk. One reviewer wrote, "This book does for art history what the dunk shot did for basketball."

"Let me give you all the pieces that ignited," Thompson explains, sitting in a campus restaurant. "I grew up in Texas; I was crazy about boogie. I wasn't a football player or anything, and I realize now that any elements of attractiveness I had for girls then were both musical and black-influenced. My senior year at prep school, I went to Mexico City on a trip. There was this mambo � Mexico City was awash in mambo � I heard waiters humming it, I heard it on the lips of gas-station attendants, I heard it in the background when talking to the hotel operator on the phone. It was my first full shot of African music: all-out black polyphony, mambo multimetrics. A stunning woman stopped in front of me in a cafe; she heard this music, and I heard her say to her companion, 'But darling, it's such a different beat.'"

A mambo called "The Newspaper Shirt Mambo" � La Camisa de Papel � by Justi Barretto, is the principal icon of Thompson's career. A broken shard of the Mexican 78-rpm record as sung by Perez Prado hangs framed in his study. "Specifically, it's about a black who wears a shirt literally made of scare headlines � a shirt of newspaper. The song had no fear of strong subject matter � it was about the beginning of the Korean War and about the fear of thermonuclear war. One line goes, 'Hey, black man, got the news?' I was irradiated with this music, hopelessly hooked on mambo."

[...]

"Music called," Thompson says, "and art history was the response." He decided to become a graduate student at Yale. "The more I studied, the more I saw how the world had covered up the source of all this. It wasn't Latin music � it was Kongo-Cuban-Brazilian music. You can hear Kongo rhythms in 'The Newspaper Shirt.' And mambu in Ki-Kongo means 'issues, important matters, text.' A mambo is a seminar on the crisscross of currents from Africa.

"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. Yoruba is still spoken there. If you were Yoruba, and taken in slavery in the nineteenth century, chances were you'd wind up in Cuba or northeastern Brazil. Afro-Cuban culture survived slavery. Those Afro-Cuban rhythms are hot, acrid and bumping. I have spent my life like a literary critic," he says, "trying to marshal all the apposite texts to decode 'The Newspaper Shirt Mambo.'"

[...]

In the process of getting tenure at Yale, Thompson published Black Gods and Kings, The Four Moments of the Sun and African Art in Motion, about the intertwining aesthetics of West African sculpture, fabric and dance. Now Flash of the Spirit is reaching readers who aren't specialists, iconographers or academics. His next book, finally, after 30 years, will be the mambo book.

"Each successive wave of immigration � Dominican, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Jamaican � enhances the music. One can speak of 'conjugating' a beat. It's explosive. Salsa was a major turning point � in 1968 New York became virtually the musical capital of the Latin world. And all of it cross-pollinating with jazz, and pure Yoruba music like King Sunny Ade, and then, through secondary reverberations, to white groups, like the Talking Heads.

[...]

Thompson is keen to distinguish between practicing West African religion and teaching the culture of which it is a part. Recently, someone he hardly knows asked him for spiritual advice, and Thompson was appalled. He thinks of himself as a medium, but a medium of the most ordinary sort. He feels that what he has to teach is merely what he's culled from all his global "informants." In Thompson's books, the acknowledgment sections tend to run to hundreds and hundreds of tiny little sonorous names, which if read aloud sound like listings from the Lagos, Rio, Ouagadougou and New Haven telephone directories combined. They are the sources of the "flash of the spirit," without which, Thompson says, he's "just Joe the gray-haired academic."

[...]

Those who slight the importance of such black folk rituals, and of Thompson's life's work, make him indignant. "How dare people patronize Africa?" he asks. "Those people stand like giants in teaching us how to live. There is a moral voice imbedded in the Afro-Atlantic aesthetic that the West can't grasp. They don't see the monuments, just barefoot philosophy coming from village elders. But the monument is a grand reconciling art form that tries to morally reconstruct a person without humiliating him." Sometimes when Thompson starts rolling, his voice takes on the cadences of black speech.

"These are the canons of the cool: There is no crisis that cannot be weighed and solved; nothing can be achieved through hysteria or cowardice; you must wear and show off your ability to achieve social reconciliation. Step back from the nightmare. It is a call for parlance, for congress and for self-confidence. 'The Newspaper Shirt' is all about wearing a crisis on your chest. Afro-Atlantic art forms are juridical and medical, as well as aesthetic. It is a very hard-nosed way to use art."...

-snip-
Click https://detroitisafrotopia.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/flash-of-the-spirit-african-and-afro-american-art-and-philosophy.pdf for a pdf file of "Flash Of The Spirit: African and Afro-American Art And Philosophy by Robert Farris Thompson

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