Dancing the Afrofuture

Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy

Halifu Osumare

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780813069876
• eBook ISBN: 9780813073026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From Dancing on the Stage to “Dancing” on the Page
• 1. Dancing Out of the Bay Area
• 2. Dancing in Hawai‘i: Scholarship and Black Dance
• 3. Dancing in Hawai‘i: Performing Hula and a Hip-Hop Doctorate
• 4. Dancing in Ohio and Nigeria
• 5. “Dancing” in Sacramento and Davis
• 6. Hip-Hoping Back to Ghana
• 7. Becoming a Public Intellectual and Celebrating Blackness
• 8. The Sankofa Process: Afrofuturism at Home and Abroad
• 9. We Got Next! From the Afro-Present to the Afrofuture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author