This interview is with Halifu Osumare, Professor and Director Emerita of African American and African Studies . She was appointed in 2005 and retired in 2016.
She has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over fifty years. She is a protégé of the late renowned dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham.
Dr. Osumare 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.
After retirement, 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. She also won the Dance Studies Association 2020 Distinction in Dance Award for lifetime achievement in performance, scholarship and service to dance. Her sequel memoir, Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy was published in 2024, exploring her transition from artist to scholar, and chronicles her tenure at UC Davis.
She is interviewed by her friend and colleague, Milmon Harrison, Associate Professor.
