Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy

Synopsis

A Black dancer chronicles her career as a scholar writing the stories of global hip-hop and Black culture

Dancing the Afrofuture is the story of a dancer with a long career of artistry and activism who transitioned from performing Black dance to writing it into history as a Black studies scholar. Following the personal journey of her artistic development told in Dancing in Blackness, Halifu Osumare now reflects on how that first career—which began during the 1960s Black Arts Movement—has influenced her growth as an academic, tracing her teaching and research against a political and cultural backdrop that extends to the twenty-first century with Black Lives Matter and a potent speculative Afrofuture.

Osumare describes her decision to step away from full-time involvement in dance and community activism to earn a doctorate in American studies from the University of Hawai‘i. She emulated the model of her mentor Katherine Dunham by studying and performing hula, and her research on hip-hop youth culture took her from Hawai‘i to Africa, Europe, and South America as a professor at the University of California, Davis. Throughout her scholarly career, Osumare has illuminated the resilience of African-descendant peoples through a focus on performance and the lens of Afrofuturism.

Respected for her work as both professional dancer and trailblazing academic, Osumare shares experiences from her second career that show the potential of scholarship in revealing and documenting underrecognized stories of Black dance and global pop culture. In this memoir, Osumare dances across several fields of study while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-present that is transforming into the Afrofuture.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a University of California, Davis Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship Award.

Copyright:

2024

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

336 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780813073026

Related ISBNs:

9780813069876

Publisher:

University Press of Florida

Date of Addition:

02/14/24

Copyrighted By:

Halifu Osumare

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Biographies and Memoirs, Social Studies

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.