Women and New and Africana Religions, Dec 31, 2009
CHAPTER 6 Sacred Dance-Drumming: Reciprocation and Contention within African Belief Systems in th... more 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 ...
Icon defines itself in act south of the Sahara. Things done, sculpture and dress, combine with th... more Icon defines itself in act south of the Sahara. Things done, sculpture and dress, combine with things happening, music and dance. A fundamental principle is made manifest: action is a superior mode of thought.
Word files for proofing This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting.... more 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
The Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area is a center of African dance in the United States, which has e... more The Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area is a center of African dance in the United States, which has evolved out of the black political and cultural activism of the 1960s. African nationals from Ghana, Congo, and Senegal established a strong community of dancers and drummers that built upon the Dunham dance legacy through Ruth Beckford, the late Katherine Dunham company member
By virtue of hawaii’s (colonial) history with the u.s. mainland and its unique geographic positio... more By virtue of hawaii’s (colonial) history with the u.s. mainland and its unique geographic position as crossroads between East and West, the 50th state offers a particularly complex example of the globalization of hip-hop culture. Hawai′i floats geographically and culturally in the North Pacific, connecting Asia, Polynesia and Micronesia, and the Americas in historical and contemporary ways (figure 3.1). Particularly as gateway to the Pacific Rim—the mid-way point between the United States mainland and Asia—Hawai′i is an interesting composite of Native Hawaiian, American, and Asian cultures.
The cultural history of the Americas is partially defined by African continuities, reinventions, ... more The cultural history of the Americas is partially defined by African continuities, reinventions, adaptations, and significations. As in any culture, these constitute actual modalities of representing and negotiating the self as subject in the social world through expressive values. One reading of the sociopolitical history of the Americas is the attempt to control this aesthetic and its black producers, while simultaneously appropriating it for economic gain and for forging various national cultural identities (i.e., Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, Brazil, the United States). Hip-hop youth culture is the current cultural practice in a long history of vital black expressivity lodged within the ambivalent realities of U.S. cultural history. Dance Studies scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild reveals that in the new-millennium-hip- hop-era, “it is not only rap’s content that rankles; it is also the form. This genre is all about rhythm, a component that can inspire fear in a Europeanist culture that knew enough about the power of African rhythm to prohibit drumming by enslaved Africans.”1 The exploration of this seductively powerful and often threatening Africanist aesthetic in hip-hop, as a global export, is the subject of this chapter.
Hiplife music in Ghana, West Africa, is explored not merely as an adaptation of hip hop, but as a... more Hiplife music in Ghana, West Africa, is explored not merely as an adaptation of hip hop, but as a revision of Ghana's own century-old popular music known globally as highlife; yet it is subject to the same postcolonial, global, and neoliberal corporate “recolonization” to which other sectors of Africa societies are subject. I dissect neoliberalism as the global free market agenda acting as a new form of colonialism in Africa through examining Ghana's ubiquitous telecommunications companies. Their lucrative corporate relationships with hiplife artists allow me to explore the meaning of modernity in Africa, as well as the place of the Structural Adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank. I conclude that hiplife music has given Ghanaian youths a counter-hegemonic voice while enabling their gainful employment, but, while doing so, hiplife music necessarily had to involve itself in capitalism's global dominance with increasing corporate privatization in Ghana and Africa in general.
The experiences and perceptions of the body are to a great extent immune to the objective, analyt... more 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.
Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was one of the great dancer/choreographers of the 20th century. As a... more 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.
<p>This chapter describes the author's return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe ... more <p>This chapter describes the author's return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe and continues to explore her blackness in the post-Civil Rights era of the early 70s (first in Boston and then in New York). Joining the Rod Rodgers Dance Company (RRDC) in NYC allows the author to become a part of developing concert dance among the major black dance companies who were second tier to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The author explores the vitality of professional NY dance and the experiences that dancing with RRDC provided, such as the Dancemobile in the 5 boroughs, the cultural integration of the Lincoln Center, and the opening of the dance season on Broadway. Additionally, she explores NY's African dance companies and the growing need to make black dance relevant to black people in these shifting political times.</p>
<p>As the longest section, chapter 6 covers sixteen years of the author's career as dan... more <p>As the longest section, chapter 6 covers sixteen years of the author's career as dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and arts administrator. During this period, she solidified her reputation in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area as a leader in the growing black dance and multicultural arts movements when she founds the non-profit dance institution Everybody's Creative Arts Center (ECAC). She assess her development as a dancer-choreographer, discussing some of her key dance works as well as the creation of the center's resident dance company, CitiCentre Dance Theatre, which was an important contemporary dance company that operated from 1983 to 1988. She also explores her simultaneous adjunct dance position at Stanford University and several of her choreographic and directorial commissions. The chapter articulates how, in 1989, her accumulated artistic and administrative experience culminated in her founding a major national initiative in black dance: Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. She concludes with how she eventually transitioned from the arts to academia after going to graduate school, and how dance and "writing dancing" are similar.</p>
This essay explores educational performance between blacks and whites in the United States and th... more This essay explores educational performance between blacks and whites in the United States and the various reasons research has given for the education gap in America. It explores both the class and race based arguments for the gap, but interjects a cultural explanation and underlying “orienting concepts” as more salient reasons for the education gap. It debunk the “cultural deprivation model” for low by blacks, and argues for actually utilizing the prolific cultural contributions of black culture in teaching methodology, particularly in higher education. It explores Critical Race Theory, as well as Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy theory to examine alternative explanations for the problem and methods to ameliorate it. Through the use of one case study, examples of how Hip-Hop Studies is shown to achieve success in making education relevant to university students of color, and black students in particular, which has implications for elementary and secondary education as well.
Every Hood Has It's Own Style' 'Making an African out of the Computer': Globaliza... more Every Hood Has It's Own Style' 'Making an African out of the Computer': Globalization and Indigenization in Hiplife 'Empowering the Young': Hiplife's Youth Agency 'Society of the Spectacle': Hiplife and Corporate Recolonialization 'The Game': Hiplife's Counter-Hegemonic Discourse
Women and New and Africana Religions, Dec 31, 2009
CHAPTER 6 Sacred Dance-Drumming: Reciprocation and Contention within African Belief Systems in th... more 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 ...
Icon defines itself in act south of the Sahara. Things done, sculpture and dress, combine with th... more Icon defines itself in act south of the Sahara. Things done, sculpture and dress, combine with things happening, music and dance. A fundamental principle is made manifest: action is a superior mode of thought.
Word files for proofing This is an edited Word file, which has been styled ready for typesetting.... more 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
The Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area is a center of African dance in the United States, which has e... more The Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area is a center of African dance in the United States, which has evolved out of the black political and cultural activism of the 1960s. African nationals from Ghana, Congo, and Senegal established a strong community of dancers and drummers that built upon the Dunham dance legacy through Ruth Beckford, the late Katherine Dunham company member
By virtue of hawaii’s (colonial) history with the u.s. mainland and its unique geographic positio... more By virtue of hawaii’s (colonial) history with the u.s. mainland and its unique geographic position as crossroads between East and West, the 50th state offers a particularly complex example of the globalization of hip-hop culture. Hawai′i floats geographically and culturally in the North Pacific, connecting Asia, Polynesia and Micronesia, and the Americas in historical and contemporary ways (figure 3.1). Particularly as gateway to the Pacific Rim—the mid-way point between the United States mainland and Asia—Hawai′i is an interesting composite of Native Hawaiian, American, and Asian cultures.
The cultural history of the Americas is partially defined by African continuities, reinventions, ... more The cultural history of the Americas is partially defined by African continuities, reinventions, adaptations, and significations. As in any culture, these constitute actual modalities of representing and negotiating the self as subject in the social world through expressive values. One reading of the sociopolitical history of the Americas is the attempt to control this aesthetic and its black producers, while simultaneously appropriating it for economic gain and for forging various national cultural identities (i.e., Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, Brazil, the United States). Hip-hop youth culture is the current cultural practice in a long history of vital black expressivity lodged within the ambivalent realities of U.S. cultural history. Dance Studies scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild reveals that in the new-millennium-hip- hop-era, “it is not only rap’s content that rankles; it is also the form. This genre is all about rhythm, a component that can inspire fear in a Europeanist culture that knew enough about the power of African rhythm to prohibit drumming by enslaved Africans.”1 The exploration of this seductively powerful and often threatening Africanist aesthetic in hip-hop, as a global export, is the subject of this chapter.
Hiplife music in Ghana, West Africa, is explored not merely as an adaptation of hip hop, but as a... more Hiplife music in Ghana, West Africa, is explored not merely as an adaptation of hip hop, but as a revision of Ghana's own century-old popular music known globally as highlife; yet it is subject to the same postcolonial, global, and neoliberal corporate “recolonization” to which other sectors of Africa societies are subject. I dissect neoliberalism as the global free market agenda acting as a new form of colonialism in Africa through examining Ghana's ubiquitous telecommunications companies. Their lucrative corporate relationships with hiplife artists allow me to explore the meaning of modernity in Africa, as well as the place of the Structural Adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank. I conclude that hiplife music has given Ghanaian youths a counter-hegemonic voice while enabling their gainful employment, but, while doing so, hiplife music necessarily had to involve itself in capitalism's global dominance with increasing corporate privatization in Ghana and Africa in general.
The experiences and perceptions of the body are to a great extent immune to the objective, analyt... more 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.
Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was one of the great dancer/choreographers of the 20th century. As a... more 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.
<p>This chapter describes the author's return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe ... more <p>This chapter describes the author's return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe and continues to explore her blackness in the post-Civil Rights era of the early 70s (first in Boston and then in New York). Joining the Rod Rodgers Dance Company (RRDC) in NYC allows the author to become a part of developing concert dance among the major black dance companies who were second tier to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The author explores the vitality of professional NY dance and the experiences that dancing with RRDC provided, such as the Dancemobile in the 5 boroughs, the cultural integration of the Lincoln Center, and the opening of the dance season on Broadway. Additionally, she explores NY's African dance companies and the growing need to make black dance relevant to black people in these shifting political times.</p>
<p>As the longest section, chapter 6 covers sixteen years of the author's career as dan... more <p>As the longest section, chapter 6 covers sixteen years of the author's career as dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and arts administrator. During this period, she solidified her reputation in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area as a leader in the growing black dance and multicultural arts movements when she founds the non-profit dance institution Everybody's Creative Arts Center (ECAC). She assess her development as a dancer-choreographer, discussing some of her key dance works as well as the creation of the center's resident dance company, CitiCentre Dance Theatre, which was an important contemporary dance company that operated from 1983 to 1988. She also explores her simultaneous adjunct dance position at Stanford University and several of her choreographic and directorial commissions. The chapter articulates how, in 1989, her accumulated artistic and administrative experience culminated in her founding a major national initiative in black dance: Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. She concludes with how she eventually transitioned from the arts to academia after going to graduate school, and how dance and "writing dancing" are similar.</p>
This essay explores educational performance between blacks and whites in the United States and th... more This essay explores educational performance between blacks and whites in the United States and the various reasons research has given for the education gap in America. It explores both the class and race based arguments for the gap, but interjects a cultural explanation and underlying “orienting concepts” as more salient reasons for the education gap. It debunk the “cultural deprivation model” for low by blacks, and argues for actually utilizing the prolific cultural contributions of black culture in teaching methodology, particularly in higher education. It explores Critical Race Theory, as well as Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy theory to examine alternative explanations for the problem and methods to ameliorate it. Through the use of one case study, examples of how Hip-Hop Studies is shown to achieve success in making education relevant to university students of color, and black students in particular, which has implications for elementary and secondary education as well.
Every Hood Has It's Own Style' 'Making an African out of the Computer': Globaliza... more Every Hood Has It's Own Style' 'Making an African out of the Computer': Globalization and Indigenization in Hiplife 'Empowering the Young': Hiplife's Youth Agency 'Society of the Spectacle': Hiplife and Corporate Recolonialization 'The Game': Hiplife's Counter-Hegemonic Discourse
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