PUBLICATIONS

Black Popular Culture Scholar, Dance Educator, Choreographer
Winner of the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics 
by the American Society of Aesthetics

The 2019 American Book Award 
by the Before Columbus Foundation

PUBLICATIONS


University Press of Florida, Hardback, 2018, Paperback Edition 2019.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Paperback Edition, 2013.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Paperback Edition, 2008.

The Hip Life in Ghana
The  Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip Hop
Dancing In Blackness
Click the images for a downloadable book description. Click the links below for video discussions on each book.

New 1-hour talk, "Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir: The Power of Telling Your Own Story," on Camille A. Brown's Facebook Live Series called "Social Dance for Social Distance" August 3, 2020.

Harvard University’s HIPHOPEX presents “The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip Hop,” November 18, 2020:


REFEREED BOOK CHAPTERS & JOURNAL ARTICLES
(Excerpt)

“Globalization and The Hip-Hop Dance Cipher,” 
co-authored with Terry Bright Osofu in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson, eds., Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Educating Black Youth Through Hip-Hop Studies,” 
in Revista Educação, Artes e Inclusão (Journal of Education, Arts and Inclusion) V. 16, No. 3 (2020), 31-50.

"Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir"
University Press of Florida, Hardback, 2018. Paperback 2019.

“The Fierce Freedom of Their Souls': Activism of African Dance in the Oakland Bay Area,” in Hot Feet and Social Change: African Dance and Diaspora Communities, eds. Kariamu Welsh, Esailama Diouf, and Yvonne Daniel. University of Illinois Press, 2019.

“Hiplife," in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. XII Genres: Sub-Saharan Africa. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 273-278.

“Socialization through the Arts: Katherine Dunham as Social Activist,” in Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human, Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Peter Lichtenfels, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, 297-314.

“Damsel in Distress: Django Unchained as Revenge Fantasy,” in Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the sate of Black Hollywood, ed. Ismael Reed. Chicago: Third World Press, 2015, 81-83.

“Keeping it Real: Race, Class, and Youth Connections Through Hip-Hop in the U.S. & Brazil,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 37, 2015, 6-18.

“Marginalidades Connectivas” do Hip Hop e a Diáspora Africana: os Casos de Cuba e do Brasil, in Mõnica do Amaral and Lourdes Carril, eds., O Hip Hop e as Diásporas Africanas na Modernidade. São Paulo, Brazil. Alameda, Ca, 2015.

“Conjuring Magic as Survival: Hip-Hop Theater and Dance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, Nadine George-Graves, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 29-37.

“Getting ‘A Message Through to the Red, White, and Blue’: Ice-T in the Age of Obama,” in Josephine Metcalf and Will Turner, eds., Rapper, Writer, Pop-Cultural Player: Ice-T and the Politics of Black Cultural Production. Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014, 255-278.

“Wrapped in Illusion: The Hip-Hop Emcee as Trickster,” in Toyin Falola, ed. Ésú: Yoruba God, Power, and the Imaginative Frontiers. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2013.

“Hip-Hop’s Connective Marginiality in the African Diaspora: The Cases of Cuba and Brazil,” The African Diasporas in the Modern World: Culture, Identity and Resistance. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Vozes, 2013.

“Becoming a ‘Society of the Spectacle’: Ghanaian Hiplife Music and Corporate Recolonization.” Popular Music and Society online, March, 2013: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2012.747262.

“Motherland Hip-Hop: African American Youth Culture in Senegal and Kenya,” in Ifeoma C.K. Nwamkwo & Mamadou Diouf, Eds. Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrances , University of Michigan Press, 2010, 161-177.

“Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s Research-to-Performance Model,” “Migration of Movement: Dance Across Americas,” a special issue of AmeriQuest (www.ameriquests.org) 7.1 (Spring 2010)

“Sacred Dance/Drumming: Reciprocation & Contention within African Belief Systems in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area,” in Lillian Ashcraft Eason, Darnie Martin, and Oyeronke Olademo, Eds., Women and New and Africana Religions. Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 2010, 123-144.

“Rap & Hip Hop,” Encyclopedic Entry, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, F. Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo, Eds. Oxford University Press, 2010, 272-275.

“The Dance Archeology of Rennie Harris: Hip-Hop or Postmodern?” in Julie Malnig, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, University of Illinois Press, 2008, 261-281.
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