Dancing the Afrofuture

A Black dancer chronicles her career as a scholar writingthe stories of global hip-hop and Black culture Dancing theAfrofutureis the story of a dancer with a long career of artistry and activism who transitionedfrom performing Black dance to writing it into history as a Black studies scholar. Following the personal journey of her artistic development told in Dancingin Blackness, Halifu Osumare now reflects on how that first career-which beganduring the 1960s Black Arts Movement-has influenced her growth as an academic, tracingher teaching and research against a political and cultural backdrop thatextends to the twenty-first century with Black Lives Matter and a potentspeculative Afrofuture. Osumaredescribes her decision to step away from full-time involvement in dance andcommunity activism to earn a doctorate in American studies from the University of Hawai'i. She emulated the model of hermentor Katherine Dunham by studying and performing hula, and her research onhip-hop youth culture took her from Hawai'ito Africa, Europe, and South America as a professor at the University ofCalifornia, Davis. Throughout her scholarly career, Osumare hasilluminated the resilience of African-descendant peoples through a focus on performanceand the lens of Afrofuturism. Respectedfor her work as both professional dancer and trailblazing academic, Osumareshares experiences from her second career that show the potential ofscholarship in revealing and documenting underrecognized stories of Black danceand global pop culture. In this memoir, Osumare dances across several fields ofstudy while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-presentthat is transforming into the Afrofuture. Publicationof this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the AmericanRescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and aUniversity of California, Davis Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship Award.