The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop Power Moves

This book explores the two major reasons for hip-hop culture's proliferation throughout the world: 1) the global centrality of African American popular culture and the transnational pop culture industry of record companies and entertainment conglomerates; and 2) 'connective marginalities' that are extant social inequalities forming the foundation for an 'underground' network of hip-hop communities. Both of these levels of hip-hop's global circulation are based in the youth culture's Africanist aesthetic, which is an extension of previous black artistic expressions such as verbal word play, polyrhythmic dance improvisations, radical juxtapositions of musical structures, and the folkloric trickster figure. Additionally, the text explores computer technology and the internet in this age of information that also serves hip-hop culture's globalization.

Halifu Osumare has been involved with dance and African American cultural studies internationally for over thirty years as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, administrator and scholar. She grew up in San Francisco, California and did much of her initial artistic and academic work in Oakland.  She holds a M.A. in Dance Ethnology and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  She is currently Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis.  She has also had academic appointments at Green State University in Ohio (2000-2005) and at Stanford University (1981-1993).   As a dance educator, she is protégé of Katherine Dunham and is a certified teacher of her technique.  As an arts administrator she was the Founder of CitiCentre Dance Theatre in Oakland, as well as the Founder of the national dance initiative Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century that took place from 1989-1992 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego.  Osumare has always seen the performing arts and the humanities as inextricably linked, and her approach to hip hop scholarship encompasses this vision.  She has published on global hip hop in the Journal of American & Comparative Studies, Columbia Journal of American Studies, and Dance Research Journal and also has chapters on the Africanist aesthetic in global hip hop in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (2005) and Marvels of the African World: Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections, and Identities (2003).

Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes, and Def Moves: The Africanist Aesthetic Meets the Hip Hop Globe * Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Hip Hop's Connective Marginalities * Props to the Local Boyz: Hip Hop Culture in Hawai'i * 'It's All about the Benjamins: Postmodernism and Hip Hop's Appropriation Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes, and Def Moves: The Africanist Aesthetic Meets the Hip Hop Globe * Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Hip Hop's Connective Marginalities * Props to the Local Boyz: Hip Hop Culture in Hawai'i * 'It's All about the Benjamins: Postmodernism and Hip Hop's Appropriation