FLASH OF THE SPIRIT: AFRICAN AND AFRO-AMERICAN ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Published by Vintage Books, NY, 1984, softcover, illustrated, index, 317 pages, condition: very good.

This landmark book shows how five African civilizationsYoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross Riverhave informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.

Fighting to combat racist notions, Thompson centers the book on documenting a proud and ancient heritage of the Africans and African-Americans. Thompson goes into extreme detail on the differences between art in Africa and the Americas. Examples of the similarity range in places from Cuba, Haiti, Brazil to Yoruba and Benin. Elaborating on the spiritual, Thompson sketches a picture of the complex approximation of Haitian vodun to the religion of Kongo, Dahomey and Yorubaland. Magnificently drawing out the religion of Haiti as a genus of it's own, Haitian history is examined to determine how the religion came to existence. Thompson alludes to the touch and enduring spirit of the Haitians in using the religion to overcome the oppression of the French and win the revolution, becoming the first black republic in the New World. Reading the book can be worthwhile for laymen or scholars, novice or professional and the free-styled or the inquisitive. The limitations of the book were few and far between