‘The Hiplife in Ghana’ Author Speaks At The Schomburg Center In Harlem

Halifu Osumare, Ph.D., is a Associate Professor and Director of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis, will discuss her new book The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop.

The Hiplife in Ghana is one of the only full-length, single-authored texts on hiplife music and Ghanaian culture and represents the culmination of the author’s 32 years of immersion in the traditions and popular culture of Ghana. As a Fulbright Scholar, she also spent eight months conducting fieldwork in the capital city of Accra and at the University of Ghana, Legon, where she interviewed and spent time with artists, producers, academics, and cultural critics. Additionally, she attended concerts and impromptu performances in the burgeoning hiplife scene in Accra.

It blends the global and local—to understand how hip-hop and hiplife have empowered Ghanaian youth to have a greater say in their country’s social, political, and economic growth, as well as how hiplife artists negotiate the global pop culture marketplace that has created a neo-colonialism in Africa.

Over the last 15 years, as hiplife music and culture has evolved, three generations of hiplife artists form an indigenizing continuum and create key central issues explored in this text, such as:

·      Globalization and Indigenization in Hiplife

·      Hiplife’s youth empowerment

·      Hiplife and Corporate Recolonization

·      Hiplife artists’ counter-hegemonic projects that are forced to operate in the context of the government’s neoliberal economic strategies.

She will be in Harlem for an international tour appearing at the Schomburg Center on November 5, 2012, at 6:00pm.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd., New York, NY 10037

More information about the book and Dr. Osumare is available at www.halifuosumare.com

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