Africana Tango

• Abstract of an abstract:  Tango means to hold (on to) in Latin.  This entry is about retaining gestures from Africa and analyzing how these gestures have been diffused into African American culture and across the black diaspora despite European opinion that their culture has not been infultrated by said gesticulation.  Anyone who would like to can do further research on this topic.  I am just introducing it as a platform.  

  Africana Tango

Though the relationship of African to African American culture extends beyond music and oral traditions, African American language retains derivatives of interrelationships that can be traced back to the African continent.  The ethnocentrism of European music and language prompted the notion of tabula rasa, which insists African American culture, is devoid of important vestiges of African culture and that contact with Europeans and the ravages of slavery have destroyed all remnants of African culture, creating a culturally clean slate.  However, African American music and language is an eloquent and unbroken arch of metaphysical presuppositions, patterns, and figurations shared through space and time among black cultures from Africa and throughout the Black Diaspora.  The blues, jazz, hip-hop, Ebonics, satire, toasting, testifying, and sermons all serve the purpose of ethnic signification though they seem encapsulated by European formulations.  In actuality African American music, language, and culture is an embodiment of history that reflects the ambiguity or material and spiritual culture that can be traced back to Africa and primitive social exchanges.  Intricate rhythms, gestures, movements and other clicks of recognition that accompany black music continue to develop into complex forms as they build impetus from their African origins.  The significance of Africana music and language is symbolic of the constant power relationships under colonization cultivated in part by European social forces that have attempted to nutshell the black soul's subjugation, resistance, and accommodation to the European infrastructure.  Though European Americans have attempted to Co-opt blackness in music and language, African culture has instead fortified the black Diaspora with semantics of empowerment that can be surmounted through black vernacular, song, and gesticulation.