African American & African Studies

Public Enemy showed us that Rap music is not afraid of subjects connected with national and race issues. We started to see how powerful Rap could be if it were used in expressing our attitudes. The kind of lyrics and consciousness that reveals the whole process of civilization, which is the story of dominance.

Public Enemy showed us that Rap music is not afraid of subjects connected with national and race issues. We started to see how powerful Rap could be if it were used in expressing our attitudes. The kind of lyrics and consciousness that reveals the whole process of civilization, which is the story of dominance.

Hip-Hop is a new cultural phenomenon originating in the US. Its influence can be seen in music, fashion, language and the club scenes in the global context. Tourism is a special form of ''gaze'' constructing the other. This paper attempts to contextualize Hip-Hop tourism by problematizing the interrelations between culture, tourists, and attractions, situating a discussion of these relationships within the wider discourses of gaze and authenticity. It suggests that Hip-Hop tourism is an important, if neglected, component of cultural tourism, and proposes that Hip-Hop tourism can be viewed through three technologies of gazes: (1) initial gaze: voyeurism, mimesis and appropriation of black culture. Hip-Hop tourism begins with the initial gaze by tourists attracted through the curiosity about the other;

This autoethnography explores a dance scholar's previous choreographic trajectory, positioning the author's career within the sixties and seventies Black Arts Movement for social change. Osumare explores several iterations of her dance lecture-demonstration in particular, which was produced over two decades and three continents, demonstrating how temporal and spatial shifts affect the content and context of a choreographic work. Additionally, she explores her shift into arts producing through her national dance initiative that helped define the work of eighties Black choreographers in the postmodern dance movement. The result is a consideration of how being Black, female, and a dancer provides a particular sociohistorical lens.

After discussing in the last two chapters the evolution of the indigenization of hiplife music and culture within the global-local problematic, as well as the significant social and cultural inroads that the subculture has made generationally in Ghana, I turn now to the economic implications of hiplife—its obligatory interfacings with local and multinational corporate structures within global commerce affecting Ghana. Hiplife, as a part of the GHHN and Ghana’s local pop music industry, is positioned both within hip-hop’s global trajectory across Africa, as well as Ghana’s place in Africa’s development. Hip-hop music is poised centrally in the continent’s economic growth because of “the arc of mutual inspiration” musically between Africa and its diaspora, as well as youth pop culture’s focal point in late capitalism’s spread throughout the world. Just as Katherine Cole assessed for Ghana’s early theatrical form in the black American-influenced concert parties of 1930s and 1940s, so t...

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was one of the great dancer/choreographers of the 20th century. As a trained anthropologist and author, her unique contributions formed a marriage between dance and ethnology that developed the archetype of the scholar-artist. I explore her research-to-performance methodology that trail-blazed what has been analyzed by Caribbeanist VèVè Clark as "performance ethnography." Dunham explored Afro-Caribbean culture and dance, as well as her own African American culture. The essay demonstrates how she did this specially in her writings on the Jamaican Moroons and the Vodou of Haiti, recontextualizing the latter in her famous 1945 "Shango" dance work. In the process, Dunham danced the Black Atlantic well before that trope was even conceptualized, and dignified black dance forms of the Americas.

The experiences and perceptions of the body are to a great extent immune to the objective, analytic description that technology prefers; they can be hinted at in poetry and art, but they always constitute a real and inexhaustible resource against narrow rationality.-Jonathan Benthall, The Body Electric When I arrived at nine o'clock, the deejay was spinning "trip hop" style disks in the "chill room" upstairs until the formal dance show was supposed to start at ten o'clock downstairs. Critical mass is important: the event did not begin until midnight; size of crowd and group energy are the determining factors for starting time in hip hop culture. Eventually, the audience of about two hundred consisted of black, white, Asian, Hawaiian, military, and civilian patrons who were mostly in their late twenties. "What's up, y'all? Y'all ready for the show?" asked Jamal, Honolulu hip hop promoter and emcee, to open the event. Jamal proceeded to read from a script about the beginnings of American society's acceptance of "African American culture in the 1920s Jazz Age," putting what was about to happen in historical context and giving the event an informative purpose. This scripted narration of hip hop's historical context at a club event reflected an interest in specific African American origins of the pop culture form expressed by many global hip hop leaders. Thus began "Urban Movement," a November 1998 b-boy (breakdance) event produced at the Wave Waikiki nightclub in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. What followed was a demonstration of the currentday variations of hip hop dance that began in the 1970s with virtuosic athletic b-boying or bgirling and "popping," the phenomenal muscular control of the rapid-fire rhythmic isolations. Urban Movement provided several hip hop enactments that illuminated what I investigate in this essay-the interdependence of performance and performativity as dual forces in global breakdancing. Hip hop culture has come to constitute a major force in the contemporary American popular culture market, while simultaneously proliferating as an "underground" international network of loosely connected hip hop communities. African American music and dance have Halifu Osumare holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is currently Assistant Professor of Dance and American Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests are the globalization of hip hop culture and the use of popular dance by contemporary choreographers. She recently published "Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe " in the Journal of American and Comparative Cultures and is currently under contract for a book on global hip hop culture by Wesleyan University Press. Osumare is also a certified instructor of the Katherine Dunham technique and was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company of New York City in the early 1970s.

Word files for proofing This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting. This is now the final opportunity to review your text and amend it prior to publication. Any queries about the text have been inserted using Comment boxes in the Word files. Please answer these queries in your corrections. Once you have responded to a query, you can delete the comment. When making your corrections, please consider the following: Thank you for your cooperation. Chapter 11 Getting "A Message Through to the Red, White, and Blue": Ice-T in the Age of Obama By Halifu Osumare The title of this chapter is taken from a verse in Ice-T's 1992 track "Body Count" on the infamous debut album by his all-black rock band Body Count. The verse reads: "Goddamn what a brother gotta do to get a message through to the red, white and blue? / What I gotta die before you realize I was a brother with open eyes? / The world's insane while you drink champagne and I'm livin' in black rain." 1 These lyrics quintessentially represent what Robin DG Kelley calls "the first-person autobiographical accounts" of gangsta rap street journalism that positions the political within the personal lived experience of the urban inner city black male. 2 This verse not only signals Ice-T's street roots in the Crips territory of South Central Los Angeles (LA), but also his innate political awareness of his plight as a black male in urban America. As evidenced by lines such as "You try to ban the A.K., I got ten of 'em stashed / With a case of hand grenades," it also dramatizes his flair for hyperbolic "revenge fantasies" that initiated the then fledgling genre of gangsta rap, allowing urban black males to rhetorically inflict their retribution on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for its infamous police brutality. 3 Within just a few months, the LAPD's disrepute was about to become world news with the 1992 Rodney King beating and the subsequent urban rebellion that followed the acquittal of the police officers involved. Even if "Body Count," as well as his more notorious "Cop Killer," were not really rap records, it was perceived as "hip-hop." 4 Ice-T had already ushered in gangsta rap with his bestselling "6 in the Mornin'" on his 1987 album Rhyme Pays, and as Ice-T himself reveals, "That became the signature Ice

CHAPTER 6 Sacred Dance-Drumming: Reciprocation and Contention within African Belief Systems in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area Halifu ... from the Old World to the New World, African peoples utilized their propensity to embody spirit and the divine principle, whether ...