Join Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in conversation with author Halifu Osumare at Greenlight Bookstore May 21st

Halifu Osumare, author, dancer, and professor emerita of African American Studies at University of California, Davis, presents her globe-trotting, decades-spanning, deeply personal new memoir. Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist and world-renowned dance scholar who boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a Black woman. Equal parts memoir, history, cultural analysis and catalog, Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir finds Osumare using her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment.

Osumare discusses her new book in conversation with Jawole Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women. A signing and Q&A follows the conversation.

Event date: 

Monday, May 21, 2018 at 7:30pm

Event address: 

Greenlight Bookstore Prospect Lefferts Gardens Store

632 Flatbush Ave.

Brooklyn, NY 11225

ABOUT THE BOOK: Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and twenty-three countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career.

Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. She moved to Europe, where she taught "jazz ballet" and established her own dance company in Copenhagen. Returning to the United States, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company in New York City and played key roles in integrating black dance programs into mainstream programming at the Lincoln Center. After dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland's black dance scene. Along the way, she collaborated with major artistic movers and shakers: among them, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, and Donald McKayle.

Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. This is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist and a world-renowned dance scholar who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.