Flash of the spirit: African and Afro-American art and philosophy

Relying on more than twenty years of wide-ranging field research, distinguished Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson describes the specifically Yoruba, Kongo, Dahomean, Mande, and Ejagham artistic, philosophic and religious influences on the sculpture, painting, architecture, textiles and ideography of people of African descent in the western hemisphere (the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia and Brazil, among other places). A revolutionary work of astonishing scope and depth, Flash of the Spirit illumines and celebrates human accomplishments connecting black Atlantic worlds. As Professor Thompson himself puts it: "I hope, in opening these lines of inquiry, that the identification and explanation of some of these mainlines, intellectually perceived and sensuously appreciated, will provide a measure of the achievement of African civilizations in transition to the West, a documentation of one of the great migration styles in the history of the planet."