ABSTRACT
Black culture' is a concept first created by Europeans and defined in opposition to 'European culture'. In European culture, financial and production cycles have largely supplanted the conscious sort of natural return in black culture. In black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates there in an equilibrium. Repetition in black culture finds its most characteristic shape in performance: rhythm in music, dance and language. The black church must be placed at the center of the manifestations of repetition in black culture, at the junction of music and language. The outstanding fact of late twentieth-century European culture is its ongoing reconciliation with black culture. The mystery may be that it took so long to discern the elements of black culture already there in latent form, and to realize that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but one of force.
