| Revision as of 17:52, 18 April 2006 editDeeceevoice (talk | contribs)20,714 editsm fix link← Previous edit | Revision as of 21:56, 18 April 2006 edit undoFriday (talk | contribs)19,776 edits merge?Next edit → | ||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| <div class="messagebox merge"><!--PNG images containing transparencies do not display properly for some users. Please consider this fact before replacing the already tiny GIF file.-->] It has been suggested that this article or section be ] with '']''. (])</div>] | |||
| While the ]n continent is vast and its peoples diverse, certain standards of beauty in artistic expression and physical appearance, of propriety of comportment and demeanor are held in common among various indigenous African societies. Taken collectively, these standards are thought to comprise a generally accepted '''African aesthetic''', the constituent components of which are: | While the ]n continent is vast and its peoples diverse, certain standards of beauty in artistic expression and physical appearance, of propriety of comportment and demeanor are held in common among various indigenous African societies. Taken collectively, these standards are thought to comprise a generally accepted '''African aesthetic''', the constituent components of which are: | ||
Revision as of 21:56, 18 April 2006
While the African continent is vast and its peoples diverse, certain standards of beauty in artistic expression and physical appearance, of propriety of comportment and demeanor are held in common among various indigenous African societies. Taken collectively, these standards are thought to comprise a generally accepted African aesthetic, the constituent components of which are:
- luminosity of motion ("looking sharp")
- youthfulness
- smoothness (patina)
- clarity of form and detail, complexity of composition
- composure of the face, or cool.]
Luminosity of motion
Youthfulness
Smoothness
Composure of the face, or cool
Mystical coolness and the "mask of the cool"
Manifestations in the African diaspora
In African Art in Motion, African art scholar and Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson turns his attention to cool in both the African and African-American contexts:
The mind of an elder within the body of the young is suggested by the striking African custom of dancing "hot" with a "cool" unsmiling face. This quality seems to have haunted Ten Rhyne at the Cape in 1673 and it struck the imagination of an early observer of strongly African-influenced dancing in Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, who noted "thumping ecstasy" and "intense solemnity of mien." The mask of the cool, or facial serenity, has been noted at many points in Afro-American history.
It is interesting that what remains a spiritual principle in some parts of Africa and the rare African-influenced portions of the modern U.S.A., such as tidewater Georgia, becomes in the mainline Afro-American urban culture an element of contemporary street behavior:
Negro boys…have a 'cool' way of walking in which the upper trunk and pelvis rock fore and aft while the head remains stable with the eyes looking straight ahead. The…walk is quite slow, and the Negroes take it as a way of 'strutting' or 'showing off'....
The…cool style of male walking in the United States is called bopping…. Mystical coolness in Africa has changed in urban Afro-American assertions of independent power. But the functions, to heal and gather strength, partially remain. And the name cool , remains. And the body is still played in two patterns, one stable, the other active, part energy and part mind.