Looking Back Over My Writings

The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2008)

This is my most well-known treatise on how hip-hop became an international phenomenon. It is a revision of my 1999 Ph.D. dissertation, "African Aesthetics, American Culture: Hip-Hop in the Global Era." I am proud that it became a harbinger of how global hip-hop was becoming during a time when cultural pundits were still talking about hip-hop as a passing fad. My concept of "connective marginality" acknowledged the agency of global youth using rap, deejaying, and breaking to talk back to various systems of power.

The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop (2012)

Always looking at how Africa is left out of the equation, I realized as the field of globalization of hip-hop was growing through emphasizing Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, few were researching how it was affecting Africa. After achieving a Fulbright Fellowship, I was able to spend six months in Ghana hanging out with Accra emcees, deejays, producers, and dancers. The result was a second hip-hop book showing how the U.S. Black-Latino youth culture was blending with the highlife pop music of West Africa into Hiplife. This book helped me achieve Full Professor status.

Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir (2018)

After retiring from UC Davis in 2016, I was free to focus on my own life story. Dancing in Blackness explores from my high school years in the mid-60s and subsequent undergrad years at SF State, where I decided to become a dancer. It continues through my world travels, the establishment of my Everybody's Creative Arts Center and my choreographic and cultural activism in Oakland to moving to Hawai'i in 1994. it became an award-winning book, documenting the microcosm of my life in the context of the development of Black dance in the US.

Dancing The Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and The Dunham Legacy (2024)

Dancing the Afrofuture picks up my life story in Hawai'i where I lived for seven years, studying and performed hula while earning a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It investigates how I became interested in hip-hop, seeing how much the youth culture was influencing the islands. This story chronicles my transition from dancer-artist to scholar-educator, exploring the similarities between "Dancing on the Stage and Dancing on the Page." It also exposes my deep reverence for my main dance mentor, Madame Katherine Dunham, who lived the life of the Artist-Scholar, showing us all that those two callings are not mutually exclusive.