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 of hip-hop youth culture. As Osumare climbs the academic ladder, eventually becoming Full Professor at University of California, Davis, she illuminates the resilience of African descendant peoples through performance and the trending lens of Afrofuturism. Readers will be fascinated by Osumare’s career that “dances” across several fields, from Black dance to global pop culture, while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-Present that is transforming into the Afrofuture.

About the Author

Dr. Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita in the Department of African American and African Studies (AAS) at University of California, Davis, and was the Director of AAS 2011-2014. She has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over forty years. With a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and an MA in Dance Ethnology from S.F. State University, she is also a protégé of the late renowned dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham and a Certified Instructor of Dunham Dance Technique.

As an artist-scholar, Dr. Osumare has performed, taught, and conducted research not only in the U.S., but also in the African countries of Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya, and recently in Brazil. Her dancing, teaching and writing spans the traditional African to the contemporary African American. She has been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of global hip-hop, publishing The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves in 2007 and, and The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop in 2012, resulting from her 2008 Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Ghana, Legon. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on hip-hop, dance, black choreographers, and Katherine Dunham.

Dr. Osumare published her autobiography Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir in 2018 that won the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics and the American Book Award Dr. Osumare also won the Dance Studies Association 2020 Distinction in Dance Award for lifetime achievement in performance, scholarship and service to dance. Forthcoming in February 2024 is her sequel memoir,