Thompson, Robert Farris

New York. 1983. July 1983. Random House. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394505158. 318 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Richard Adelson. Jacket art: Bronze plaque of Representation of Leopard. courtesy of Linden Museum, Stuttgart. West Germany. keywords: Art Philosophy Africa History. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In Roll, Jordan, Roll Eugene Genovese remarked: ‘Robert Farris Thompson (is) the art historian of Africa who has turned his talent to Afro-America and sketched the course that creative new work is likely to follow'.' A decade later, Thompson gives us his magnum opus. Here - long awaited, eagerly anticipated - is Flash of the Spirit, a landmark of scholarship combined with originality: the first book in any language to show, with precision, clarity and thoroughness, how five classical African civilizations have shaped black cultures throughout the Americas. And more: it contains illustrations galore. Relying on more than twenty years of wide-ranging field research, distinguished Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson describes the specifically Yoruba, Kongo, Dahomean, Mande, and Ejagham artistic, philosophic and religious influences on the sculpture, painting, architecture, textiles and ideography of people of African descent in the western hemisphere (the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia and Brazil, among other places). A revolutionary work of astonishing scope and depth, Flash of the Spirit illumines and celebrates human accomplishments connecting black Atlantic worlds. As Professor Thompson himself puts it: ‘I hope, in opening these lines of inquiry, that the identification and explanation of some of these mainlines, intellectually perceived and sensuously appreciated, will provide a measure of the achievement of African civilizations in transition to the West, a documentation of one of the great migration styles in the history of the planet!' inventory #46137 ISBN: 0394505158.