Keynote Introduction for Robert Farris Thompson

It is my pleasure this evening to introduce our closing Keynote speaker, Robert Farris Thompson. But I have to begin by asking: “Who is Robert Farris Thompson?” and “Why do you need to know this?” That is actually how the foreword to his book Tango: The Art History of Love begins. Cornel West has described him as “one of the greatest pioneers in the study of Afro-American culture and African culture” (qtd. in Shufro). He’s also been credited with charting a whole new way of addressing the continent of Africa in terms of its visual forms. But this is insufficient. He reminds us of something. When in 1939 Aimé Césaire writes in “Notebook of a Return to a Native Land” “not an inch of this world devoid of my fingerprint”: He reminds us of this. He dares to remind us of this when in book after book, lecture after lecture, he turns Africa into (and this is to borrow from Katherine Coryton White), a “verb.” A verb that articulates the world. He does this when he asks his students in lectures: “How do black musicians manage to do this? How do they manage to conquer the whole planet?” He does this when in his work on Tango, he rescues Tango from the white North American’s attempt to reconnect with self and love through Tango from Al Pacino to Robert Duvall, when he challenges us to instead see the black hand, heart, body, and mind that shapes this beat. He does this when he says “All Latin American dances have Afro roots.” He has been doing this since, as he says, he realized it was a “stupid” idea to be a lawyer and an Afro Cuban scholar. And here if you’ll indulge me I’ll actually quote from him:

My only memories of Law school are mambo memories. I remember the last day singing in the shower knowing a friend of mine was going to drive me from Charlottesville from the University of Virginia Law School all the way to the Palladium. We got to the Palladium and Tito Puente saw me and he waved and I felt vindicated. Then I wrote a letter to this professor that I’d worked with in Andean Art History and asked if I could study under him. Luckily, there was a slot open and boom I got in. Then, he wanted me to work in Andean Art History but after six months I couldn’t live a lie. I told him “I have to work with the Yoruba. Because why? Because they are one of the cultures that feed heavily the formation of Mambo.”

(Thompson)

Choosing to follow the academic path laid out for him by Tito Puente and a gesture, Robert Farris Thompson was off and has been publishing continuously since 1958 on music, dance, art, and religion from Africa to Brazil. In his study of African expressive cultures and societies, he has traced a philosophy of the body that encompasses textile production, dance, movement, sound, and gesture. He has redefined theory as improvisation. He has done this in book after book. Black Gods and Kings, African Art in Motion, The Four Moments of the Sun: Congo Art in Two Worlds, and the seminal Flash of the Spirit, where he traces Yoruba, Fon, Bakongo, and other aesthetic traditions in the New World. He’s done this in the face of the gods, and will do so in the forthcoming aesthetic of The Cool: Afro Atlantic Art and Music. And I apologize, I’m fairly sure that before I am done with this introduction he will have published another book so this is necessarily incomplete. He has also curated exhibitions of African and African American Art in any number of venues but most prominently, The National Gallery of Art. His work has been translated into French, German, Flemish, and Portuguese. He himself knows Spanish, Yoruba, Kikongo, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Italian. He’s won numerous awards, including the leadership award of the Arts Council of the United States African Studies Association. He’s won the College...