Super Special Dance Project

Black History Month Day 20: Double Dutch (from PBS by David Hoffman https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006MXD7O/)

2nd: Billy Ricker & Norma Miller (aka The Queen of Swing)

3rd: Al Minns & Willa Mae Ricker

4th: Frankie Manning & Ann Johnson

This is the Bop. The Bop is a type of social dance. Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. A social dance isn’t choreographed by any one person. It can’t be traced to any one moment. Each dance has steps that everyone can agree on, but it’s about the individual and their creative identity Because of that, social dances bubble up, they change, and they spread like wildfire. They are as old as our remembered history.

In African-American social dances, we see over 200 years of how African and African-American traditions influenced our history. The present always contains the past. And the past shapes who we are and who we will be.

Now, social dance is about community and connection; if you knew the steps, it meant you belonged to a group. But what if it becomes a worldwide craze? Enter the Twist.

It’s no surprise that the Twist can be traced back to the 19th century, brought to America from the Congo during slavery. But in the late ‘50s, right before the Civil Rights Movement, the Twist is popularized by Chubby Checker and Dick Clark. Suddenly, everybody’s doing the Twist: white teenagers, kids in Latin America, making its way into songs and movies. Through social dance, the boundaries between groups become blurred.

The story continues in the 1980s and ‘90s. Along with the emergence of hip-hop, African-American social dance took on even more visibility, borrowing from its long past, shaping culture and being shaped by it. Today, these dances continue to evolve, grow and spread.

Why do we dance? To move, to let loose, to express.

Why do we dance together? To heal, to remember, to say: “We speak a common language. We exist and we are free.”

From the TED-Ed Lesson The history of African-American social dance - Camille A. Brown

Camille A. Brown is a choreographer fusing dance and social commentary to explore race, sexuality and femininity.

I love Africans Man.

Your brain suppresses perception of heartbeat, for your own good

Our heart is constantly beating yet we normally do not feel it. It turns out that our brain is capable of filtering out the cardiac sensation so that it doesn’t interfere with the brain’s ability to perceive external sensations. For the first time, researchers from the Center for Neuroprosthetics at EPFL have identified this mechanism. They discovered that a certain region in the brain determines where internal and external sensations interact. Their work appears in The Journal of Neuroscience.

EPFL’s neuroscientists noted that the brain perceives visual stimuli less effectively if they occur in time with the heartbeat. It seems as if the brain wants to avoid processing information that is synchronized with the body’s heartbeat.

“We don’t see the same way as a video camera does”

“We are not objective, and we don’t see everything that hits our retina like a video camera does,” said Roy Salomon from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, one of the study’s co-authors. “The brain itself decides which information to bring to awareness. But what’s surprising is that our heart also affects what we see!”

The researchers carried out an initial series of experiments with more than 150 volunteers. The volunteers were subjected to a visual stimulus – an octagonal shape flashing on a screen. When this geometric shape flashed in sync with the subject’s heartbeat, the subject had more difficulties perceiving it.

What’s happening in the brain - a first insight

The researchers just needed to figure out what was happening in the brain. They were able to show that a specific region, the insular cortex, acts as a filter and intercepts the sensations coming from the body’s beating heart.

They did this by running the experiment again in an MRI scanner. When the visual stimuli were not in sync with the subject’s heartbeat, the insular cortex functioned normally and the subject perceived the flashing octagon easily. But when the stimuli occurred in time with the heart rate, the level of activity in the insular cortex dropped noticeably: the subject was less aware – or totally unaware – of the flashing shape being shown.

It did not take long for Roy to get over his initial surprise at his discovery. “You don’t want your internal sensations to interfere with your external ones. It’s in your interest to be aware of what’s outside you. Since our heart was already beating while our brain was still forming, we’ve been exposed to it since the very start of our existence. So it’s not surprising that the brain acts to suppress it and make it less apparent.”

Is feeling one’s heartbeat realted to anxiety?

Awareness of one’s heartbeat is known to be correlated with a number of psychological problems, including anxiety disorders. Patients typically perceive their heart rate more clearly than most people. “But someone who does not suffer from this type of disorder can also be aware of their heartbeat,” said Roy. “This can happen at times of intense excitement or fear, for example.”

But Timbaland seems to love African music so I wouldn’t be surprised if he listened to some M’Balax before producing this

He sampled Fela Kuti’s Colonial Mentality for Missy Elliot’s Whatcha Gon’ Do

And of course his production for Beyoncé’s Grown Woman (feat Ismael Kouyaté) (the connection here seems to be Fela!) and you can hear him doing the beat/melody in the background with his voice. He’s a genius and he has great taste.

It’s funny how you ask that as if you already know the answer. Hmm, could it possibly be because you’ve already decided any evidence that exists is insufficient before you’ve even seen it? No wonder, if you’re also using “revisionist” as an unqualified pejorative.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. History is constantly being revised. Revision is the only way it can lay any claim to truth in the long term, since we are always finding new objects, new information is being discovered, and new scholars are entering the discipline with diverse perspectives and making new connections. Revision also means we need to unearth the prejudices of the past, as well as those of the present, and analyze the way it affects how we write and think about our histories. Who we are affects what we believe is “relevant”; our lived experiences and culture affect what we believe has value and importance.

Acting like histories written fifty or a hundred years ago should remain carved in stone as if they’re sacred is patently ridiculous. We don’t believe that for medicine, or law. There are always new discoveries, new evidence, new people working today to take into account, and adjust our knowledge accordingly in order to serve society better. The problem is that most of what I post is known to academia, it’s just dispersed throughout several different disciplines and sub-disciplines, and pushed aside as exceptions to a dominant narrative that is preserved, not in academia, but in popular culture and the media we produce and consume.

If you’d looked at the bibliography for this blog, or the link dumps, or the resources tag, or the static resources page, or just used google instead of scoffing in my inbox with ideas you’re soooo suuure are completely ridiculous, you’d have seen there is evidence, plenty of it, and it’s becoming a more explored and documented topic every day.

You can read about trade routes between the Roman Empire and Asia in Antiquity here:

Long-distance trade played a major role in the cultural, religious, and artistic exchanges that took place between the major centers of civilization in Europe and Asia during antiquity. Some of these trade routes had been in use for centuries, but by the beginning of the first century A.D., merchants, diplomats, and travelers could (in theory) cross the ancient world from Britain and Spain in the west to China and Japan in the east. 

You can read more about the actual routes used and their accessibility here:

You can read even more about trade and cultural exchange between various Empires in the East and the West here:

By the end of the first century B.C., there was a great expansion of international trade involving five contiguous powers: the Roman empire, the Parthian empire, the Kushan empire, the nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu, and the Han empire. Although travel was arduous and knowledge of geography imperfect, numerous contacts were forged as these empires expanded—spreading ideas, beliefs, and customs among heterogeneous peoples—and as valuable goods were moved over long distances through trade, exchange, gift giving, and the payment of tribute. Transport over land was accomplished using river craft and pack animals, notably the sturdy Bactrian camel. Travel by sea depended on the prevailing winds of the Indian Ocean, the monsoons, which blow from the southwest during the summer months and from the northeast in the fall.

You can read an exploration of a relatively new translation from a 3rd Century Chinese explorer who called the Roman Empire “a land ruled by minor kings” here:

This country (the Roman Empire) has more than four hundred smaller cities and towns. It extends several thousand li in all directions. The king has his capital (that is, the city of Rome) close to the mouth of a river (the Tiber). The outer walls of the city are made of stone.

…The ruler of this country is not permanent. When disasters result from unusual phenomena, they unceremoniously replace him, installing a virtuous man as king, and release the old king, who does not dare show resentment.

The common people are tall and virtuous like the Chinese, but wear hu (‘Western’) clothes. They say they originally came from China, but left it.

I mean, you’re talking about people moving from east Asia to Europe, which can be achieved simply by walking far enough. The Silk Road has been in use for millennia, and before that, its prehistoric version, the Steppe Road, has evidence for even earlier travelers buried deep under it.

This isn’t new, and it isn’t some kind of secret. From the perspective of World History, the ease and ubiquity of trade between Europe, Asia, and Africa means we should consider the development of those areas as an interdependent network:

World historians are becoming increasingly aware of the underlying unity of Afro-Eurasian history. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills have argued that the entire Afro-Eurasian region belonged to a single “world-system” from perhaps as early as 2000 B.C.E. And William McNeill and Jerry Bentley have recently restated the case for a unified Afro-Eurasian history. But Marshall Hodgson had made the same point as early as the 1950s, when he argued that “historical life, from early times at least till two or three centuries ago, was continuous across the Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization; that zone was ultimately indivisible… The whole of the Afro-Eurasian zone is the only context large enough to provide a framework for answering the more general and more basic historical questions that can arise.”

If you’re concerned with the logistics of travel, well, there’s actually an entire interactive map for that. ORBIS is the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, and you can input where you’d like to go and your modes of travel, and it can give you a route and how long it would take you, depending on how much money you have to spend versus how much effort you’re willing to put forth.

As for “sub-saharan Africa”, Mediterranean Europe became rather dependent on the wealth of gold and salt that came from Ghana and Western Sudan. If you’re curious about the history of the Tran-Saharan Gold trade, you can read more about it here:

 From the eighth century onward, annual trade caravans followed routes later described by Arabic authors with minute attention to detail. Gold, sought from the western and central Sudan, was the main commodity of the trans-Saharan trade. The traffic in gold was spurred by the demand for and supply of coinage. The rise of the Soninke empire of Ghana appears to be related to the beginnings of the trans-Saharan gold trade in the fifth century.

From the seventh to the eleventh century, trans-Saharan trade linked the Mediterranean economies that demanded gold—and could supply salt—to the sub-Saharan economies, where gold was abundant. Although local supply of salt was sufficient in sub-Saharan Africa, the consumption of Saharan salt was promoted for trade purposes.

This is an image of Mansa Musa, ruler of the Malian Empire. He made that particular journey himself, as far as Cairo, where his exorbitant wealth broke the local economy just from his presence:

The flow of sub-Saharan gold to the northeast probably occurred in a steady but small stream. Mansa Musa’s arrival in Cairo carrying a ton of the metal (1324–25) caused the market in gold to crash, suggesting that the average supply was not as great. Undoubtedly, some of this African gold was also used in Western gold coins. African gold was indeed so famous worldwide that a Spanish map of 1375 represents the king of Mali holding a gold nugget. When Mossi raids destroyed the Mali empire, the rising Songhai empire relied on the same resources. Gold remained the principal product in the trans-Saharan trade, followed by kola nuts and slaves. The Moroccan scholar Leo Africanus, who visited Songhai in 1510 and 1513, observed that the governor of Timbuktu owned many articles of gold, and that the coin of Timbuktu was made of gold without any stamp or superscription.