Following a 1953 tour of Ghana, Afro-American novelist and essayist Richard Wright described his first impressions of his “ancestral homeland” in the book Black Power. Wright was taken aback by the differences and similarities between Africans and black Americans. The shared characteristics were particularly puzzling for Wright, since he had long assumed that the centuries which had transpired and the traumatic experience of slavery obliterated any possibilities for African “survivals” in America. However, his face-to-face encounter with West African dance, gestures, and cultural patterns recalled similar traditions in the United States. Wright’s acknowledgement of “some kind of link,” along with the same realization by anthropologists and historians form the ideological core for the Field Museum of Natural History’s exhibition African Insights: Sources for Afro-American Art and Culture. The connections between various African peoples and their Afro-American descendants are often not immediately apparent. Layers of time, as well as cross-cultural influences, refashion African expressions into American statements. But the indelible mark of several West African civilizations continues through time and over the dominant culture, expressing itself in an outlook and style that is essentially “Black Atlantic.” The arts and cultures that exist along Africa’s west coast – from Senegal’s Cape Verde to just below the mouth of the Congo River – are reinvented among black populations in South America, the Caribbean, and the United States with striking results.
African and Afro-American Art: Call and Response. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, 1984.
