Halifu Osumare Reading & Presentation of Dancing the Afrofuture

Watch the livestream Here

About the Book

Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy is the sequel to Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir (2018). It chronicles the next stage in Halifu Osumare’s life and career from dancer-activist to scholar-academic, beginning with her leaving dance and community activism in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area in early 1994 and transitioning to Hawai‘i where she earns a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Hawai‘i. In the process, she follows her mentor Katherine Dunham’s model by studying and performing hula, while researching the effects of hip-hop culture on Hawaiian youth. This unlikely story by a unique dancer-academic leads to Osumare becoming a recognized scholar in the burgeoning field of global Hip-Hop Studies.

Osumare’s scholarly career takes her to several continents---back to Africa and Europe, and eventually to South America, as she develops her theory of “connective marginality” explaining the internationalization…