In her recently released book The Hiplife In Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop, Halifu Osumare (above, right), an associate professor and Director of the African American & African Studies Program at the University of California, Davis, explores what she calls “the arc of mutual inspiration”.   That is, a continuous loop of music and dance influences that flow from Africa to its diaspora and then back again.  The latest example–if you count Kenya benga music, juju and Afrobeat in Nigeria, bongo flava in Tanzania, kwaito in South Africa and Congolese soukous–is Ghana’s hiplife, a distinctive mix of highlife hip-hop along with reggae and dancehall.

Osumare’s book is the culmination of over three decades of immersion in the traditions and popular culture of Ghana. She explores how Ghana’s youth have taken the insurgent energy of hip-hop and have been inspired to find their voice beyond music and, in a very traditional society, join the larger socio-political conversations that are taking place.

Dr. Osumare will start a book tour next month.  Dates are as follows:

October 18:  Accra, Ghana
10 am
Institute for African Studies
University of Ghana, Legon
Featuring: Halifu Osumare; Professor Emeritus Kwabena Nketia; Obour (Bice Osei Kufuor) President, Ghana Musicians Union; and DJ Black

October 27:  Edinburgh Scotland
9:30 am-5:30 pm
Africa in Motion Symposium
University of Edinburgh

October 28: London, England
Africana Centre | Business of Culture
Covent Garden

November 1:  Brooklyn, NY
6 pm
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA)

November 2:  New York, NY
6 pm
NYU
Institute of African American Affairs

November 5:  New York, New NY
6 pm
Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture

December 1:  Philadelphia, PA
4:30 pm
African Studies Association
Hip-Life, Hip-Hop and Popular Music in West Africa

Check out the introduction to the book here:

Introduction to "The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop"

 Additional link:

• Dr. Halifu Osumare official

Remember when you used to go to the neighborhood bookstore and browse the books? Some of you still do, but many don’t. It’s just the world we live in, right?  If you really didn’t know anything about a book, how would you make a decision to buy it? You’d check out the cover.  Some of you would even take a look at the author’s photo and give some weight to the his or her attractiveness while you were making your decision (don’t front: you know you did!). But mostly, you’d read a few pages to see if the story hooked you and made you want to take that book home.

So, similar to the way we’ve been posting musical tracks for you to hear, we’re going to start posting book excerpts for you to read.  We’ll also give “Excerpts” its own subcategory under books: Over time, you’ll be able to jump directly to that area to see what we’ve highlighted.  This way, you can decide for yourself if an author really grabs you, if the book really speaks to you.  We’ll get started with Victor Lavalle’s The Devil In Silver, which one reviewer described as “part slapstick, part horror story.” The official description is as follows:

New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one.

Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die?

The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.

You can check out the first four chapters of the book here:

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle (an excerpt)

 Additional links:

• Victor Lavalle official
• Victor Lavalle On What Makes The Best Monsters