Critical Review - Rodano

Rodano argues that many historians have fabricated elaborated ideas about slave music from "shards of evidence" and "inadequate alternatives" that attempt fill gaps in a history that is most lacking in credible evidence and documentation. Rodano stresses that much of black music's "originary voice" was a result of/reaction to slavery as opposed to a natural African predisposition to a certain way of creating and performing music. He believes that the tendency to view black music as static, that it's the fundamentally the same now as it was hundreds of years ago, must be done away with in favor of a view that acknowledges how enslaved African-Americans shared their enslavement more than there heredity and that the music was "created by them" as slaves, not as a homogenous body of Africans. Many of the stereotypes held about black music seem to date back as far as the seventeenth century, when observed African behavior was described constantly as "instinctive", "bestial", and "primitive". Even though these stereotypes came more from Africans "being unacquainted with the manners of customs of Europe" than from primitive savagery, they are still used to this day to describe many of the aesthetics of black music. Rodano concludes with a discussion of how "place", physical and psychological, contributed tremendously to the development of slave music and that places should be seen more as "events" than "things". Ultimately, Rodano hopes to denounce the idea that an "African essence" is the sole contributor to black music.

Question: can immersion in a "place" where one is treated as though a primitive savage cause one to believe that they are as they are treated and if so, could one develop an aversion to one's own culture?