9 Books Published by University Press of Florida on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy by Halifu Osumare Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy

by Halifu Osumare
University Press of Florida (Feb 14, 2024)
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Also Available in Hardcover

A Black dancer chronicles her career as a scholar writing the stories of global hip-hop and Black culture

Dancing the Afrofuture is the story of a dancer with a long career of artistry and activism who transitioned from performing Black dance to writing it into history as a Black studies scholar. Following the personal journey of her artistic development told in Dancing in Blackness, Halifu Osumare now reflects on how that first career—which began during the 1960s Black Arts Movement—has influenced her growth as an academic, tracing her teaching and research against a political and cultural backdrop that extends to the twenty-first century with Black Lives Matter and a potent speculative Afrofuture.

Osumare describes her decision to step away from full-time involvement in dance and community activism to earn a doctorate in American studies from the University of Hawai’i. She emulated the model of her mentor Katherine Dunham by studying and performing hula, and her research on hip-hop youth culture took her from Hawai’i to Africa, Europe, and South America as a professor at the University of California, Davis. Throughout her scholarly career, Osumare has illuminated the resilience of African-descendant peoples through a focus on performance and the lens of Afrofuturism.

Respected for her work as both professional dancer and trailblazing academic, Osumare shares experiences from her second career that show the potential of scholarship in revealing and documenting underrecognized stories of Black dance and global pop culture. In this memoir, Osumare dances across several fields of study while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-present that is transforming into the Afrofuture.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir by Halifu Osumare Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir

by Halifu Osumare
University Press of Florida (Mar 26, 2019)
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Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer’s personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 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, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching "jazz ballet" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, 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. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.


Click for more detail about Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba by Andrea Queeley Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba

by Andrea Queeley
University Press of Florida (Jun 06, 2017)
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“Provides invaluable insight into the histories and lives of Cubans who trace their origins to the Anglo-Caribbean.”—Robert Whitney, author of State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940
 
“Adds a missing piece to the existing literature about the renewal of black activism in Cuba, all the while showing the links and fractures between pre- and post-1959 society.”—Devyn Spence Benson, Davidson College.
 
In the early twentieth century, laborers from the British West Indies immigrated to Cuba, attracted by employment opportunities. The Anglo-Caribbean communities flourished, but after 1959, many of their cultural institutions were dismantled: the revolution dictated that in the name of unity there would be no hyphenated Cubans. This book turns an ethnographic lens on their descendants who—during the Special Period in the 1990s—moved to “rescue their roots” by revitalizing their ethnic associations and reestablishing ties outside the island.
           
Based on Andrea J. Queeley’s fieldwork in Santiago and Guantánamo, Rescuing Our Roots looks at local and regional identity formations as well as racial politics in revolutionary Cuba. Queeley argues that, as the island experienced a resurgence in racism due in part to the emergence of the dual economy and the reliance on tourism, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans revitalized their communities and sought transnational connections not just in the hope of material support but also to challenge the association between blackness, inferiority, and immorality. Their desire for social mobility, political engagement, and a better economic situation operated alongside the fight for black respectability.
           
Unlike most studies of black Cubans, which focus on Afro-Cuban religion or popular culture, Queeley’s penetrating investigation offers a view of strategies and modes of black belonging that transcend ideological, temporal, and spatial boundaries.

A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk


Click for more detail about African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship by Simone A. James Alexander African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship

by Simone A. James Alexander
University Press of Florida (May 03, 2016)
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Winner of the College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award

"Brilliant. Alexander helps us to understand the complexities of race, gender, sexuality, migration, and identity as they intersect with creativity. A must-read for those interested in women’s writing today."—Ren�e Larrier, author of Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean

"Critically engages current topical issues with sophisticated scholarly readings. There is a tone of the transgressive that gives this work the kind of edge that always provides transcendence."—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Caribbean Spaces

"An authoritative and original study, characterized by meticulously researched scholarship, which focuses on the female body across a fascinating corpus of literary production in the Caribbean and elsewhere. This refreshing and effective interdisciplinary approach extends the boundaries of traditional literary analysis."—E. Anthony Hurley, author of Through a Black Veil

Using feminist and womanist theory, Simone Alexander analyzes literary works that focus on the black female body as the physical and metaphorical site of migration. She shows that over time black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society.

Through in-depth study of selective texts by Audre Lorde, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Cond�, and Grace Nichols, Alexander challenges the stereotypes ascribed to black female sexuality, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, or docile. She also addresses issues of embodiment as she analyzes how women’s bodies are read and seen; how bodies "perform" and are performed upon; how they challenge and disrupt normative standards.

A multifaceted contribution to studies of gender, race, sexuality, and disability issues, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives engages a range of issues as it grapples with the complex interconnectedness of geography, citizenship, and nationalism.


Click for more detail about These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship by A Yemisi Jimoh and Françoise Hamlin These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship

by A Yemisi Jimoh and Françoise Hamlin
University Press of Florida (Sep 15, 2015)
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Powerfully connects the history of war and peace with the long black freedom struggle in the United States, illuminating as never before the relationship between war and citizenship in the African American experience. Timothy Patrick McCarthy, coeditor of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition

 

A rich, provocative compilation that will stimulate important discussions on African Americans fraught relationship with the military. Venetria Patton, editor of Background Readings for Teachers of American Literature

 

From enslaved people who joined Washington’s Continental Army to Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars, from the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II to black men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the country’s armed forces even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity.

These Truly Are the Brave collects three centuries of poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, oral histories, letters, and political commentaries, richly contextualizing them within their specific historical moments. This anthology offers perspectives on war, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers including Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Vievee Francis, Michael S. Harper, Ann Petry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more. Some selections reveal African Americans embracing wartime service as a way to express citizenship; others show black people remaining steadfast in quiet civilian work. Courageously wrestling with their disputed place in American democracy, these writers expose and reexamine the foundations of U.S. citizenship.


Click for more detail about Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination by Rosamond S. King Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

by Rosamond S. King
University Press of Florida (May 01, 2014)
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Island Bodies analyzes cultural production from Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora writers that flouts sexual norms. The chapters focus on how homosexuality, interracial relationships, transgendered people, and women’s sexual agency are portrayed in film, music, and literature.


Click for more detail about The Varieties of Women’s Experiences: Portraits of Southern Women in the Post–Civil War Century by Larry Eugene Rivers The Varieties of Women’s Experiences: Portraits of Southern Women in the Post–Civil War Century

by Larry Eugene Rivers
University Press of Florida (Jan 03, 2010)
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"This is an excellent collection of essays, showing the contribution that women of all stations and races made to the development of the Southeast. Most of these stories have not been told before."—John Salmond, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, AustraliaThe contributors to The Varieties of Women’s Experiences offer fourteen brief biographical essays revealing the broad range of the fascinating lives lived by women in the post-Civil War South. Arranged chronologically, they chart a course of generational change, yet reveal that despite limitations there were always more opportunities for extraordinary women than we tend to realize.By including stories about white and black, Jew and gentile, rich and poor, native and immigrant, widowed and married, the book explores the diversity and complexity of what it could mean to be a "Southern woman" at a time when social norms restricted many to their household and wifely duties.A welcome addition to the literature on Southern women’s history, this book will appeal to a broad range of readers.


Click for more detail about Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation by Larry Eugene Rivers Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation

by Larry Eugene Rivers
University Press of Florida (Mar 15, 2009)
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Winner of:
• The Black Caucus of the American Library Association Nonfiction Book Award
• The Tampa Bay Historical Society’s D. B. McKay Award
• The Florida Historical Society’s Rembert Patrick Award for Best Book in Florida History
 
"A thoroughly researched and balanced account of the slave experience in Florida."—Journal of American History
 
"The greater social and economic freedom born of Spanish influence and close relationships between rebellious blacks and Seminoles set the stage for the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. A fascinating account of a variant experience of an institution too often viewed from a single perspective."—Booklist
 
"Rivers takes a very close look at slave society from various angles, as he evaluates not only slave life but the interaction of whites, blacks, and Indians… . Makes for a rich and multi-layered history."—Southern Historian
 
"Shows how slavery differed dramatically in different regions of the state and how, in fact, it evolved over the years in those areas."—Tallahassee Democrat
 
"Addresses how Florida’s history and geography produced conditions unlike those elsewhere in the American South."—Journal of Southern History


Click for more detail about Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord: The Beginnings of the AME Church in Florida, 1865-1895 by Larry Eugene Rivers Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord: The Beginnings of the AME Church in Florida, 1865-1895

by Larry Eugene Rivers
University Press of Florida (May 03, 2001)
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"Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord is church history without the halo. Yet, it is respectful of the nuances peculiar to the AMEC fellowship. It is church history in painstaking detail, but not in isolation to the social, economic, and political dynamics of the period. This is good writing, good research, and good scholarship."—Bishop Adam J. Richardson, Jr., 19th Episcopal District, AME Church, Johannesburg, South Africa

"This study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of African American, Florida, and Southern History. It treats far more than just religion — it illuminates the entire post-Civil War era in Florida."—Joe M. Richardson, Florida State University
"A brilliant and lively work that brings alive black Methodism in the late 19th century. This is an extremely important and original contribution to the history of Reconstruction in Florida, filled with fresh insights." — Stephen W. Angell, Florida A&M University"Describes the complicated relationship between black church development and black political participation during the Reconstruction era and its aftermath. The authors persuasively demonstrate how black religion extended its protection to freedmen in both sacred and secular settings." — Dennis C. Dickerson, Vanderbilt UniversityWritten by two eminent historians, Laborers in the Vineyard of the Lord examines the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida from the beginning of Reconstruction to the institution of Jim Crow segregation, a period when the AME Church played a crucial role in the religious, cultural, and political lives of black Floridians. The book begins with an overview of slave religion and the first stirrings of African Methodism before 1865 and culminates with the formidable challenges that faced the church by 1895.Not only did the AME Church save lives for Christ, it emerged as a force to be reckoned with in politics. Men such as Charles H. Pearce and Robert Meacham became powerhouses in state and local affairs as well as in the church. They and their fellow ministers fought for the participation of blacks in the governing process and promoted education and employment for all blacks and poor whites. Numerous others staunchly supported the growing national phenomenon of the temperance movement. Drawing on primary sources such as church newspapers and previously overlooked records, the authors also relate the gripping drama of the inner dynamics of AME church life and examine the impact of personality interactions on its leadership.This case study of an independent church that produced broad religious and civil freedoms for African Americans offers a detailed account of the successes and failures of one of the largest and most effective institutions in post-Civil War and late-19th-century Florida.Larry Eugene Rivers is Distinguished Professor of History at Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, and the author of Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (UPF, 2000). His work has been recognized with the Florida Historical Society’s Arthur W. Thompson Prize and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Carter G. Woodson Prize.Canter Brown, Jr., is the author of many works on Florida history, including Florida’s Peace River Frontier (UPF, 1991); Ossian Bingley Hart, Florida’s Loyalist Reconstruction Governor; and Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924. He has received the Florida Historical Society’s Rembert W. Patrick Book Award and the American Association for State and Local History’s Certificate of Commendation. He has taught at Florida A&M University.