Have you felt it? I have. For me, the pull is almost magnetic. I feel called to witness, moved to become a part of the circle. Overcome by a sense of profound interconnection, it’s as if I begin to soften into everything around me, as it all also flows into and through me. As we build on and riff off of each other’s offerings, we share dance, breath, sweat, music, cheers, and our unique, embodied styles. Through our creative and energetic exchanges, we become a collective whose power is so much more than a simple sum of individual parts. Together—if we’re lucky, if everything aligns just so—we open up new dimensions. While cyphers’ otherworldly potential is never promised, they invite transformative possibilities by design. As I pored through Imani Kai Johnson’s beautifully detailed and delicately considered prose, Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop transported me back to the sensations of my own metaphysical experiences on the dance floor. This book is a compelling, expansive exploration of breaking cyphers as living entities, how they travel through the world, and the knowledges they transmit.

Johnson deftly engages the physics concept of dark matter as a metaphor for cyphers’ invisible force, which practitioners know to be real but often struggle to describe. Her use of dark matter, which cannot be seen by the naked eye and is instead only detectable by way of its effects on other matter, pays homage to the experiences of practitioners that can exceed empirical evidence as defined by western standards. These mysterious and not-entirely-knowable qualities derive through the Africanist aesthetics and epistemologies embedded within hip hop culture’s manifestation of African diasporic ritual circle dance practices, she contends. Evoking Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s work in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Reference Gottschild1998), Johnson brings to the fore the Africanist presences through which diasporic circle technologies emerge, often obscured by insidious and pervasive antiblackness. As breaking traverses the globe, she asks how cyphers can be understood across disparate contexts and examines what cultural information gets transmitted alongside the dance’s most readily apparent visual images. Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers interrogates what—and who—gets lost (or purposefully left out) in translation, attending to the violent ramifications of misunderstanding (or ignoring) hip hop’s blackness. Whether intentional or otherwise, participants commonly weaponize unity, one of hip hop culture’s guiding principles, through colorblind and universalizing paradigms that deny the significance and influence of African diasporic knowledges and of Black people and communities. Though cyphers’ Africanist aesthetics, epistemologies, and roots may be invisibilized, they cannot, the book argues, be disappeared. Dark matter’s presence does not rely on our ability to see it. When we fail to acknowledge cyphers’ Africanist presences, however, we fail to understand them as more than circles. Without proper originary context, we cannot know cyphers as praxes of possibility, firmly grounded within the Black radical tradition. We miss the extraphenomenal elements and liberatory potential, such as alternative modes of being and of being in relation, that cyphers are designed to conjure.

Despite cyphers’ centrality to breaking culture, and to hip hop culture more broadly, Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers is the first to make them the focal point of such extensive and in-depth research. With simultaneous rigor and care, Johnson gracefully weaves together what she has gleaned through ethnographic participant observation, her collection of oral histories, and analyses of movement with a range of theory, drawn from dance and performance studies, hip hop studies, African diaspora studies, and Black study. The interdisciplinarity (or, perhaps, adisciplinarity—a purposeful refusal of Black study to conform to any disciplinary boundaries) of her approach echoes the cypher’s nature that welcomes, requires, and celebrates rather than pathologizes difference, forging unifying connections across heterogeneity. Johnson’s years of commitment to breaking scenes and the relationships and trust she has cultivated with members of these communities is evidenced by the ample number of interlocutors who contributed to her research, including Poe One, Trac2, Profo Won, and Rokafella, to name just a few. The lengthy excerpts she includes from their oral histories demonstrate her methods of theorizing in conversation with insiders’ own theorizations, rather than imposing theory onto them. Intertwined between each chapter, Johnson offers exquisitely nuanced close readings of performances, such as International Battle of the Year, that attest as much to the details of the dancing as to the holistic sensorium of the environments in which the dancing occurs. In her opening vignette, “Being There,” she recounts her experience at 2006 US-Battle of the Year, writing,

With thick description such as this, she invites us to feel these moments along with her. Her narratives depict breaths, sweat, sounds, smells, heat, and energies as much a part of the cypher as the moves executed in the center. Furthermore, because Johnson is not a breaker herself, these snapshots continuously remind the reader that everyone, regardless of their role, is essential to the cypher: “Cypher spectators are in it—listening, watching, feeling, responding” (ix).

Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers covers a lot of ground. In “Dark Matter and Diaspora: Cyphers in an Africanist Context,” Johnson situates cyphers as African diasporic ritual circle technologies. As she draws connections between cyphers and African American ring shouts, Brazilian capoeira, and Puerto Rican bomba, she highlights relationships among their transformational and liberatory potentials. By demonstrating that these shared spiritual components are, in fact, Africanist presences, she lays out in plain view what goes unrecognized when we do not attend to cyphers’ Africanist aesthetics. Next, Johnson shifts us from diasporic contextualization to the specificity of the Bronx in the 1970s and early 1980s with “Battling in the Bronx: Social Choreography and Outlaw Culture.” With this move, she offers us a conceptualization of “origin” as both/and, rather than, as often happens in the culture, juxtaposing influences from Africa and the United States as diametrically opposed. Johnson employs the term “outlaw culture” to speak to the ways Black and Brown youth in the South Bronx during the birth of breaking continuously innovated possibilities for navigating an existence always already outside the law. Breakers’ experiences living through systemic and systematic marginalization and disenfranchisement strongly influenced how battles took shape. The following chapter, “Badass B-Girls Dancing the Dissonance of a Breaking Sociality,” examines how b-girls engage with signifying practices, challenging and/or reifying dominant hegemonic constructions of gender as they do. Further complicating her earlier theorization of "badass femininity" (Johnson Reference Johnson2014), here, Johnson takes a more intersectional approach to her study of identity and personal style. “Dancing Global Hip Hop: Negotiating Difference and Tradition in Cyphers” distinguishes cyphers from circles, noting that participants’ failure to understand the Africanist imperative for difference undermines the very nature of cyphers. Her investigation into practitioners’ interactions with diversity in age, training, nationality, gender, and race cautions against assuming a romanticized view of participation. The book concludes by transitioning us online. “Coda: Cyber Cyphers and Africanist Aesthetics,” written amid the early stages of COVID-19 social distancing and stay-at-home orders, is a timely consideration of how cyphers and Africanist aesthetics may or may not traverse the internet and social media.

Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop closes with questions that continue to circulate for me long after I closed the book. “Dark matter,” Johnson writes, “is the very presence of possibility in the universe” (19). As she reminds us that so much about the power and potential of cyphers remains unknown, she leaves us with an invitation to continue exploring. Do you feel the call? Will you join the cypher?