The Origins of Afro-Caribbean Dance essays

The Origins of Afro-Caribbean Dance essays All forms of Afro-Caribbean dance have their roots in Africa. In the 15th to 18th century when the slaves were being brought over to America from Africa, they were mostly gathered from the western coast of North Senegal and South Angola. The reasons for most of them coming from this region is because the European traders thought it easier and less expensive to transport slaves from the west coast of Africa. It was impractical to take slaves from the east side of the continent because of the high mortality rates. The Goree Island, which is right off the shore of Senegal, was a holding place for the slaves, before they made their long journey to their final destinations. It was here that many of the diverse cultures seemed to have merged and later formed what would become different aspects of Afro-Caribbean dance. For example, the Woulousodong is a dance of the Wolorf people in Senegal. One of this dance's different interpretations, when learned in America, is that the movements represented those of the slaves while they walked up the gang plank. The African explanation tells us the movements signify adolescents breaking away from their parents' household and taking on new responsibilities. This is one instance where the interpretation of African dance has changed oversea. The meaning of the dance now became the experience of the people, as a whole. The one thing that they had in common was the slave trade, so many of the earlier forms of these dances reflected that experience. As these slaves began to settle in different countries, the emergence of a more cultural specific dance for started to form. Yet these new forms of dance still had strong African roots. For example, many of the slaves brought to Brazil, Haiti and Cuba were Yoruba-speaking people from southwest Nigeria. They worshipped more than 400 gods, which are still worshipped today. No doubt, they brought their religious practic ...

The Brezhnev Doctrine

The Brezhnev Doctrine The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet foreign policy outlined in 1968 which called for the use of Warsaw Pact (but Russian-dominated) troops to intervene in any Eastern Bloc nation which was seen to compromise communist rule and Soviet domination. It could be doing this either by trying to leave the Soviet sphere of influence or even moderate its policies rather than stay in the small parameters allowed to them by Russia. The Doctrine was seen clearly in the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring movement in Czechoslovakia which caused it to be first outlined. Origins of the Brezhnev Doctrine When the forces of Stalin and the Soviet Union fought Nazi Germany west across the European continent, the Soviets did not liberate the countries, like Poland, which were in the way; they conquered them. After the war, the Soviet Union made sure these nations had states who would largely do what they were told by Russia, and the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance between these nations, to counter NATO. Berlin had a wall across it, other areas had no less subtle instruments of control, and the Cold War set two halves of the world against each other (there was a small non-aligned movement). However, the satellites states began to evolve as the forties, fifties and sixties passed by, with a new generation taking control, with new ideas and often less interest in the Soviet empire. Slowly, the Eastern Bloc began to go in different directions, and for a brief time it looked like these nations would assert, if not independence, then a different character. The Prague Spring Russia, crucially, did not approve of this  and worked to stop it. The Brezhnev Doctrine is the moment Soviet policy went from verbal to outright physical threats, the moment the USSR said it would invade anyone who stepped out of its line. It came during Czechoslovakias Prague Spring, a moment when (relative) freedom was in the air, if only briefly. Brezhnev described his response in a speech outlining the Brezhnev Doctrine: ...each Communist party is responsible not only to its own people, but also to all the socialist countries, to the entire Communist movement. Whoever forgets this, in stressing only the independence of the Communist party, becomes one ­ sided. He deviates from his international duty...Discharging their internationalist duty toward the fraternal peoples of Czechoslovakia and defending their own socialist gains, the U.S.S.R. and the other socialist states had to act decisively and they did act against the anti-socialist forces in Czechoslovakia. Aftermath The term was used by the Western media and not by Brezhnev or the USSR itself. The Prague Spring was neutralized, and the Eastern Bloc was under the explicit threat of Soviet attack, as opposed to the previous implicit one. As far as Cold War policies go, the Brezhnev Doctrine was entirely successful, keeping a lid on Eastern Bloc affairs until Russia gave in and ended the Cold War, at which point Eastern Europe rushed to assert itself once more.