ABSTRACT
The continuum is the cultural foundation that African peoples throughout the world—in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas—continue to exploit, and the aspects of it are local: Caribbean music sounds like Caribbean music. Sensibility colors our everyday activities—emotional expressions as well as interior states of being. The opportunity for African artists in the “New World” to consistently present their aesthetic sensibility on a national or world stage has not generally been available. It seems that the medium most accepted by Europeans from Africans in the “New World” is and has been their music. In the United States, African Americans have found themselves in a condition of consistent hostility—hostility fostered and nourished by the State. To conclude, transformation is a guiding principle that charges the African artist with the task of making a thing that is fundamentally powerful in the first instance of its beauty.
