--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
The
> Indian National
> Congress was founded, among other things, on
> enlightenment'ish ideas,
> and founded by a British company man (so to say).
> One does not
> therefore claim that the successful Indian freedom
> struggle and the
> victory that it represented for humanity is a
> product, a feature, of
> British culture!
>
Well, wasn't it in part? Obviously there was a heavy British influence. You do speak English after all. ;)
More seriously, cultures crosspollinate constantly. I would suspect that what happened in the case of "Black music" is that the people in question used the building blocks of the dominant culture around them and appropriated them, mixed with whatever residual tradition from their home cultures remained in their conciousness. This is a no-brainer.
(The thought occurs to me that there may be a problem in this discussion in blurring together thhe categories of the present and the past -- calling Southern blacks and whites both parts of one "Southern culture" makes a lot more sense today than it would have in 1920, or 1830... Actually for a fist-generation slave who identifed still with his/her ethnic group in Africa the idea of all black people being "blacks" was probably pretty weird.)
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