UNCG - MLS610C Global Arts Unit 2 - Africa
Comments under this header are responses required in Unit 2.
PS: To view an interactive map of the African continent, click on the title to this blog post, or cut and paste http://www.africaguide.com/afmap.htm
into a new browser window.
posted by Y @ 7:20 PM
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Unit 2 Lesson 1
Blog assignment:
Do you have memories of dancing as a child? In your yard? To music in your living room when no one was watching?
I remember my make-believe friend, Mr. Monk, and just about every dandelion, snail, and rollie-pollie bug thing in my yard but I don’t have memories of dancing when I was a kid. I don’t recall that Mr. Monk danced either.
However, I do remember 7th grade gym class when about a month was set aside for dancing lessons. The boys’ and the girls’ classes were combined so that the football coach, Mr. Ledbetter, and the girls’ gym teacher, Miss Pharr, could teach us the box-step, how to waltz, and how to round dance – that form of square dancing that never gets more complicated than going on to the next partner – eewe..a BOY!!!
Anyway, the year I learned to round dance was the year that Chubbie Checker introduced “The Twist,” the latter a dance that my junior high principal banned.
When you hear music, are you affected by the rhythm you hear? Do you start to tap your foot or bob your head in time to the music?
I sort of come to a standstill when music gets started. I like to let it have all my attention so I can hear what kind it is. And then, yes, I’m affected by the rhythm that I hear – and feel sometimes before I even hear the music.
If I’m alone, I dance and jump and fling my arms and hop and cavort. I learned how to do this from two African grey parrots with whom I cohabitated for 15-years. They bobbed their heads when any music came on and did little stretching movements but when “Cry of the Valkyries” played they flew around and around and around in the house swooping in grand style, shrieking with pleasure. Hence, lending credence to why some people claim that Wagner is for the birds.
Do you think of Africa as a country or a continent?
I’ve not had the misconception of Africa as a country for a long time. Therefore, I thought it rather humorous that Radin writes, “We can safely assume likewise, that influences of a vital and transforming nature came to Africa from ancient Egypt, even if only indirectly and marginally, possibly as early as 2,000 B.C.” (African Folktales, p. 8). Where does Herr Rabin think Egypt is located!
What images come to mind when you hear the word Africa?
Very tall people, dark bronze skin; blue eyes (Liberian descendants); lots of traffic in the cities; dramatic print designs on fabrics swathed around the body by the yards and billowing yards; lingual accents like people from Kenya have; Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn on The African Queen; the Belgian office where Conrad’s main character is interviewed for a job that’s located in The Heart of Darkness; Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan; Nelson Mandela, at age 75, voting in an election for the first time in his life; gold mines, De Beers diamonds; wood carvings; drums and impromptu dancing; cheetahs stalking antelope across plains and plains of low, dry, grass; starving children’s black and white photos in Life magazine, Ethiopia’s Christian church archives; ancient Mauritania and Shakespeare’s Moor; and last week’s Time Warner Road Runner install-guy who explained his British sounding accent is because he’s from Sierra Leone; giraffes.
One of the basic characteristics of African dance is its highly evolved earth-centered cosmology. How might this world view effect communication in families, between neighboring tribes and countries and on the continent as a whole?
Our readings suggest that there’s no doubt in the earth-centered cosmological viewpoint who the revered entity is – Earth – as opposed to differing, and conflicting, views of who is revered -- Yaweh, God, and Allah -- by the three major religions effecting lack of communication in our present World. One would like to say that the one revered entity system has bonded the people of Africa into a like-minded population but what has happened instead is that outside influences, e.g., missionaries, over the past few centuries, as well as modern nations, and industrialized notions that the Earth’s resources are present to be plundered, have disrupted African cultures with the effect that neighboring tribes have clashed violently. Indeed, a revival of dance and traditions is seen as a way to reclaim peace across the continent.
While it's possible to dance without music...well...on second thought, dancing without music sounds like calesthentics. Let me start again.
One of my classmates posted on our class discussion board: " I love techno, electronic jazz, swedish, japanese jazz bands, bossa tres, and trance music as well."
Ok. More than half of these types I didn't recognize at all. Following my rule of "Know at least 60% or Bust," I went out info shopping and found a site that explains at least several genre of modern music at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music
Not content with reading about music for the past seven days of class, I wanted to HEAR some of this music. Well, scroll down to the bottom of the wiki page and click on the hot link for "EDM RADIO."
This takes you to a blog entry. Scroll down past that and there's a lengthy list of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) radio stations that broadcast over the 'Net.
If you don't need to read the definition of EDM, then go directly to http://www.edmradio.com/
Oh...and wear your headsets.
Unit 2 Lesson 2
Discuss what you have learned about African culture from viewing Hotel Rwanda.
On one level, the different tribes think of themselves exclusive, one over the other. On a second level, the European businesses that operate in Africa demand that local hires sublimate their indigenous culture and project “tourist-friendly” personas, and the Africans have. Just like in America, sometimes hiding our culture/dialect/customs, this causes African culture to manifest expressions, for, or against, personal conflicts.
Noticeably, on the basic human level, African culture has esteem for the same morals and values that mainstream middle class American culture has – perhaps more.
In the midst of chaos, several young girls dance a gentle dance together by the swimming pool. Share your impressions of this scene in the film.
Happy dance scene or no, I was not clamoring to view Hotel Rwanda. Netflix describes the two hour long movie’s setting, “Amid the holocaust of internecine tribal fighting in Rwanda that sees the savage butchering of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, […] more than 1,000 helpless refugees” [sheltered in a hotel]. Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte and Joaquin Phoenix co-star in this powerful film (sort of an African version of Schindler's List) directed by Terry George.” I didn’t clamor to see Shindler’s List either.
Hotel Rwanda...tiny little, resort hotel-size tourist attracting Rwanda...I didn’t want to remember the 1990s when news of Rwandan genocide was a current event on top of four years of current events dominated by reports of the collapsing government in Mogadishu, Somalia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogadishu/) and the infamous “Black hawk down” catastrophe. Television news, complete with repeat showings of U.S. Army Ranger's body being dragged to bits, back and forth past cheering mobs lining Mogadishu city streets; I didn’t clamor to see Black Hawk Down, ethnic atrocities, misguided UN interventions, failed diplomacies, either.
Why not watch and re-watch movies like Hotel Rwanda? Maybe we usually don't because all we see is the mind-numbing violence. The kinds of stories told by the docu-movies happen on a daily basis, usually on other – inaccessible -- continents, and the conflicts are rooted in thousands of years of repetitious history. Genocide and ethnic warfare is habitual rather than unusual, multiple generations are born, live, and die, assured that somewhere, someplace, at least for lengthy periods during any human lifetime if not generations' lifetimes, that genocide, famine, civil war is going to be de rigueur.
What a scar.
A singing little girls’ scene in Hotel Rwanda irritated me because I saw it as a screensational writer’s cheap trick. I didn’t need a scene of innocence against which to contrast systematic violence so I’d be sure to be impressed with the level of violence. Of course, the first time I viewed the movie and the scene I was mostly 16X fast forwarding through the machete hacking, tense posturing, and life or death mind games endured by Britishy accented Paul Rusesabagina, the influence buying Hutu manager of the Belgian-owned four star Mille Collines Hotel, i.e. the man destined to become an African Shindler. When the end credits finally rolled, I put the movie aside like it was a 10 second sound bite off the evening news, and began reading the lengthy written texts assigned for this unit -- anything to get the images of Kigali massacre out of my mind's eyes.
I discovered Sanford University’s African music site on the Internet and quickly discovered that talking in one dialect about “one” African music is like talking in one dialect about “one” American music; it’s possible to talk “one” dimensionally but why miss speaking with the multi-faceted, infinitely textured, richly meaningful characters!
For the record, I went back to view Hotel Rwanda extricated from its context of historically typical vicious violence, removed from the context of a man rising to meet and overcome unusual circumstances, ignored the Hollywood hype context, but wrapped this little Rwanda movie inside the cosmological context of oral cultures, African myths, musics, dances, and singings, to realize that along with the written texts we read for this unit, my impression of African culture(s) has (have) changed -- completely.
The following are additional questions asked to spark discuss on our class' Blackboard discussion forum. I'm listing them here to see how useful a blog is for keeping track of notes and comments and also, more for my own reference.
I have a feeling these are the types of questions I'll be asking when I start setting parameters for my final project for this course. We don't know all the details yet but one of my classmates offered this msg relayed from our professor:
"The online presentation and term paper are the same research topic. The online presentation will give you the chance to incorporate music and visual images much like the lessons for each unit in this course. You will be able to do intertactive things (questions for discussion, internet research suggestions, etc.). The term paper will be a more traditional paper with bibiliography, works cited, endnotes, etc. I will grade the hard copy with my comments and mail it to you so you can have it for your MALS portfolio. You can also include a disc of your online presentation," which can be blog, Website, or Power Point (PP) slide show; music, anything that demonstrates the art form about which we're writing.
We start Week 5 today. Topics for final projects are due during Week 6.
Here are the tickler questions from Week 4 (Unit 2 - Africa) that were extras:
"Drawing on your reading and your own experiences (could be a rock concert or high school dance, etc.), discuss the impact of dancing and drumming on you and the people you were with."
"What rituals in your life can help you better understand the power of ritual in African culture?"
"How does African dance demonstrate all of Dissanayake?s requirements for "making special"? Use specific examples from your reading in your discussion."
How does dance in African countries sustain the stories, myths and legends of each culture?"
I think it was Friday afternoon when it suddenly hit me how painfully ironic that in the same way I was listening to African radio for it's music to tell me about the different ethnic groups of people, it was the radio that was used to foment the 1994 Rwandan genocide war; the little girls in Hotel Rwanda were dancing to whose music?
Before we started this portion of Unit 2, I didn't know exactly where Rwanda was located in Africa. On my blog is a link to an interactive map of Africa. The type size used to print Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is bigger than the spec of country on top of which it's printed.
All week long I stumbled into bits and pieces of news about Africa. For instance, here's an article, "Will we learn from Rwanda," in The Pretoria News, a paper whose masthead says it's "the paper for the people of Tshwane."http://www.pretorianews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3427918
The article is one of several recent ones about Rwanda at: http://www.topix.net/world/rwanda
To point to the documentary that one of my classmates wishes someone would make, please visit http://www.topix.net/forum/world/rwanda/TP2G2JB42JI9Q75UL
Today, I had an Edward T. Hall moment at the Kroger Super Store. The check out clerk had an accent. I asked her where she was from. She said, "Africa."
I said, "Well, that's like me saying I'm from North America. What country are you from?"
She was very surprised. She said, I'm from Gambia in West Africa." I said, "Wow. That's neat!"
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