Halifu Osumare’s first memoir, Dancing in Blackness, expanded what the dance memoir genre could do. Osumare, who danced with several companies on different coasts of the US and even multiple continents, told the story of an entire world of dance through the lens of someone who circulated in many areas. She had the perceptiveness to understand the broader cultural and historical phenomena that she was helping to shape from the 1960s through the 1990s. Osumare shines once again in this second memoir, Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy. Like her first, it expands the memoir genre. If Dancing in Blackness told the story of an entire late-20th century world of dance and African diasporic dance in particular, Dancing the Afrofuture expands on how to connect dance, politics, and scholarship in the early twenty-first century.
In the introduction, Osumare establishes the main theme of this book: her transition from being predominantly an artist to predominantly a scholar in the service of her overall activism to highlight the importance of Black culture (3). She names Katherine Dunham as a mentor in this work. Indeed, reading Dancing the Afrofuture filled me with the same gratitude I felt while working in Dunham’s archives. Both Dunham and Osumare understood their value, and thus took time, care, and attention to document their lives. In Dancing the Afrofuture, Osumare brings up the oft-repeated axiom that Western culture is too logocentric and overvalues the written word to the detriment of dance and other forms of embodied knowledge. In response to this axiom, historically many in the dance field took the defensive posture that declared the written word totally inadequate, at best a necessary evil and at worst, actively harmful. Osumare instead follows Dunham’s lead in finding value in both. She, like Dunham before her, engages in productive dialogue between writing and dancing in a way that enhances both forms of disseminating knowledge. The introduction also introduces how Afrofuturism influenced Osumare’s worldview. It is an additional layer in an already-complex story, but a welcome one in which Osumare examines past histories of futuristic thinking and offers a “mandate not just to imagine…but to actually be any manifestation of ourselves our minds and spirits can conjure” (13).
Osumare’s first three chapters cover her six years in Hawaii from 1994 to 2000. While Osumare had lived all over the world throughout her earlier career, she states that moving to Hawaii “felt different” (20). There was something more permanent about this transition, as it represented not just a new place to pursue dance, but also a new way of living life—one which included immersion into academia. She participated in growing and sustaining a Black community on the Big Island, where she lived with her first husband Kimathi Asante; she joined the academic community of the University of Hawaii through her PhD program in American Studies on Oahu; and finally, she began to learn hula. Osumare writes, “As a trained dance ethnologist and a protégé of Katherine Dunham, I could not ignore the danced-based Indigenous culture where I lived” (57). Osumare also brought her scholarly lens to bear on the hula and drew comparisons between the historical repression of hula in Hawaii and the historical repression of African expressive culture in southern US colonies, building a larger theoretical approach to the “politics of the body” that demonstrated dance’s relationship to colonialism and anti-colonial resistance (61).
While in Hawaii, Osumare fearlessly threw herself into another new genre: hip hop. Hip hop as practiced by the multiracial, multi-ethnic youth of Hawaii became the foundation of her dissertation research, and it positioned Osumare at the vanguard of dance studies. Upon graduating from University of Hawaii, she received a visiting professorship at UC-Berkeley and taught the institution’s first accredited hip hop course (80). Chapter Four, “Dancing in Ohio and Nigeria,” details Osumare’s move to Bowling Green State University in 2000 to take a tenure-track position and further discusses her hip hop scholarship, which she publishes in multiple books and articles. This section reminded me of Osumare’s importance in establishing the emerging field of hip hop dance studies. I began teaching college courses in 2014, and almost every syllabus of mine has included readings by Osumare. Until I read Dancing the Afrofuture, I didn’t stop to consider how lucky I was that Osumare, among others, pioneered scholarship on hip hop, fighting against academia’s ingrained prejudices against taking Black popular culture seriously. I did not have to argue hip hop’s value to the administrators reviewing my syllabi because Osumare had done it for me. If I had started teaching just a decade earlier, I would not have had that luxury.
Osumare’s particular contributions were myriad. She detailed the global spread of hip hop culture and theorized concepts such as “connective marginality” and “the intercultural body” to make the persuasive argument that something more than simple appropriation was happening in places like Hawaii or Ghana. She also challenged distinctions between “street” dance and “concert” dance by looking at the work of Rennie Harris in an essay I often assign, “The Dance Archaeology of Rennie Harris: Hip-Hop or Postmodern?”
Alongside documenting these exciting professional developments, Osumare opens up in the book about the personal challenges she faced during this period, including the struggle to balance career ambitions, spiritual needs, and her first husband’s expectations about marriage. As with Dancing in Blackness, the intertwining of the personal, the professional, and the political is one of the brilliant aspects of this memoir. It models a way to write about the personal that opens up to a larger world rather than narrow it.
Chapter 5 returns Osumare to California, where she becomes a professor of African American Studies at UC-Davis and meets her future second husband, Gene Howell. In Chapter 6, Osumare returns to Ghana (she went for the first time in 1976), this time under the auspices of a Fulbright Fellowship. As before, she has sharp observations about diasporic relationships. She researches Ghanaian hiplife, a music genre that combines Ghanaian aesthetics and American hip hop. She develops the concept of “The Arc of Mutual Inspiration” (174) to analyze how this combination happens not in a simple mash-up fashion, but rather in arcing traces back and forth across the Atlantic: Africanist aesthetics influence Black cultural production in the United States, which then travels back across the Atlantic to Africa through popular culture forms like hip hop, which then is indigenized through Ghanaian hiplife musicians.
In Chapter 7, “Becoming a Public Intellectual and Celebrating Blackness,” Osumare becomes a leader in dance studies and African American studies. Her role as an esteemed elder scholar means that national media now reach out to her for statements about Black aesthetics and their significance to American society. In her concluding chapter, “We Got Next! From the AfroPresent to the Afrofuture,” Osumare reflects on contemporary events as of the time of writing the book (2021-22), such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, and the continuing malicious influence of former (and now current) US President Donald J. Trump. She considers what Africanist aesthetics have to offer this fractured moment. Osumare asserts, “Black cultures have the vitality and the perseverance to carry the burden of being ‘next’” (244). In a moment of national bleakness, she grounds her sturdy hope on an Afrofuturism that reconfigures the “collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of modernity” and “builds on those past Africanist philosophical countermemories” (257).
One of the last quotes in the book is from Eva Yaa Asantewaa: “Our need to document what we do as Black creatives in this society is always an issue because so much information is lost or distorted, or other people take credit for things” (254). Fifty years from now, when our social media posts from the early twenty-first century will be lost in the overwhelming overload of digital information, Osumare’s meticulous documentation will stand out as a record of our times: how did Africanist culture circulate the dawn of the new millennium? How did hip hop engender new connective possibilities among youth cultures around the world? How did a dancer, educator, and activist in her 40s take a brave leap and transform her career by entering a PhD program, and what did she observe about the relationship between African diasporic cultural production and politics during that time? Dancing the Afrofuture is an important text for dance scholars regardless of age, status, or position, inspiring both on a personal level as well as a field-wide one.
