Reading Response to Everything but the Burden

Reading Response to Everything but the Burden

The notion of Africans invading the territories of whites has been a significant concern for over two or more decades now. Cases of racism have been realized every year, at least, despite the efforts of governmental and international organizations to curb it. The due course of this is the oppression of black people physically and cultural practices that have been adopted by many other cultures in the world, especially the white culture. Irrespective of the beneficial part of the black American (African) culture to the whites, there has been an adverse interrelation and correlation of the inhabitation of black people in white’s geographical segments.

But our focus is not on the people in this excerpt. We discuss the stolen or rather artificially and naturally accepted benefactors of African cultural practices among European or whites with a claim of modification or even having discovered some. As the article focuses on artifacts that motivate the inclusion of blacks in the production of arts, music and even films, we get insights into influences of the black culture into a white man’s territory, which has been accepted and used over the years to its benefit.

The excerpt shows how different elements have been used to materialize the way specific informational details may be relayed by having a diversity of different backgrounds of the traditions and practices that different communities utilize. However, not all the cultural perspectives will be addressed except for the art and musical part of it as used in the book. The propensity to which it has impacted development concepts of artifacts displayed in portraits and diversification of production of Jazz music is a typical example devolved in the context and sets a perfect standard of what white people are taking from black culture. And this forms the baseline of the reactions to the presence of appreciated black practices in whites livelihoods.

The book provides two instances of the insurgence of cultural perspectives in Europe. The first instance is the emergence of African art in Europe. The European people were challenged by the artifacts knowing very little of them and considered them as aliens. The context to comprehend the generated objects was little, i.e. their formation, the operation and definition of their structures and the significance of the arts to their creators.

This experience was an intriguing one because Europeans met the production of art to what they were accustomed to, i.e. their Western paintings. The invention of Cubism by Picasso provoked questions about the effects that these cultural inheritances would have on the lives of Europeans. The introduction of this concept, Cubism, facilitated the mere limitation of the white people to Western paintings/arts to more broader and fascinating introspection of black existence and production other than norms used to. It opened doors for alternative systems of how art was to be viewed at a different angle.

The use of this approach offered multiple fixed points of view rather than the single fixed one of the Western revival perspective. This was considered a betrayal to the inclusion of African artifacts as it gave different ways to see art in more than one way, which was opposite to the European approach of having a subjective agency with less objectivity in it. The African artifacts worked both ways. This is to say that the viewers and artifact’s relationship worked both ways. Each had something to offer in return as the understanding and description of both the sculpture and the viewer were intertwined.

However, neglecting to conceive the use of black bodies in the art would deny the acceptance of the coloured nature of the world through time and space. Europeans took this as a threat to their Eurocentric beliefs but have had massive advantages reaped from the inclusion of African culture in the white’s imaginations as implied by the forty photographs that Picasso obtained from Edmond Fortier that he used in developing Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

The second instance is the occurrence of Jazz music. Music narrates a lot about the person who created it. Jazz music demonstrated the manifestation of how Africans behaved, spoke dressed, idiomatic nature of occupying space, philosophies, styles and articulation of the generative and aesthetic procedures of music. Through music, as described by the example of Pollock in the book, the Western mimetic paintings became more modernized than the previous focus on the physical appearance of the universe. It developed a new paradigm that was advantaged by the performance of professional genesis and integral importance to get rid of the mimetic impulses absorbed by Europeans. The use of music in terms of choreography and gestures emulated the way paintings were jotted down by Pollock. However, there was a doubt of the significance of the music to drawing and appearance of the arts.

But why would black music be so significant in developing imaginations even for paint? It is clearly due to the displacement of the impacts it had on diverse cultures as compared to the existing representations of human being setup. The paradox of the movement of black bodies resulted in the expressivity of black music that found its way through to serve in all classical manners. Outcomes were acceptance of its natal context and the evolution from the ruling class to new experiences. According to the study on Pollock, black music facilitated the improvisation of trajection and flowed in jazz, helping in accessing the methods of the outcomes of his works predictions. In simpler terms, black music helped in the self-determination of the potentials that one can post and self-possession of the results of the works produced by them and hence demeans the claims posted about by white men of how self-possessed and self-determined they are.

Not only do these two sections elaborate on how black culture can be included in white lives. Even in the film industry, the use of black bodies, often considered as aliens on some occasions, can be productive in playing some essential roles. Their significance was undermined for a long while, but being part of film production showed how coloured the globe is with different races and species of humanity. It is incapable of having a society that is entirely dominated by a single race or type of people. Films display the need to incorporate every aspect of the environment into our lives and resolve the resistance to be in good terms with everything and everyone. Therefore, as much as whites want to deprive the black (African) community of how much they have helped in developing various fields and industries in Europe, the African culture has been crucial l to their productivity. And it is not anywhere close to stopping as more innovations and inventions from blacks keep on invading the white man’s lives.