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RobJe -> RE: El pais article on African influence in flamenco (Nov. 8 2016 10:12:21)
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Not a full translation but here is a summary
The article draws attention to a documentary film entitled Gurumbé - songs of your black memory, directed by Miguel Angel Rosales It gives an account of the “silenced history” of slavery in Andalusia and looks at the influence of Africans on Adalusian culture. The film will premiere in Spain at the Seminci de Valladolid.
Points made in the text include
Spain was a slave centre from the 14th to the early 19th century. Africans from the west and the interior were carried by thousands on ships that sailed from the Gulf of Guinea to Cadiz and Seville, and sometimes accounted for 10% of the population of these cities. Spain and Portugal supplied the rest of Europe and subsequently Latin America with slaves This has not been discussed in Spanish texts “because of the stigma of being the most important slave centre in the world" according to Isidoro Moreno, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Seville.
The film “ rescues all that history and the influence that the Africans exerted in the culture of Andalusia". The “cultural inheritance of those slaves” is portrayed in the film. It gives examples including “barefooted Senegalese dancing on the Atlantic sand, clashing their hands against their legs, taking their skirts to the rhythm of the drum's skin in scenes that undoubtedly resemble those of a woman dancing in a tablao” and argues that “these slaves passed the rhythms from Africa to Andalusia and from there to Latin America.”
The film examines wider cultural influences in literature, art, music and dance. It mentions the “extramuros” (those compelled to live outside the city walls) who included liberated slaves or those rejected by age or illness and the foundation of persecuted brotherhood that still remains in Seville, now called Los Negritos.
Rob
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