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 careerāwhich began
during the 1960s Black Arts Movementāhas 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.