UCR Department of Dance

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson

Associate Professor, Department of Dance, UC Riverside

Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop

(Oxford University Press, 2022)

Come celebrate the publication of Dr. Imani Kai Johnson’s book with a distinguished panel of speakers:

Naomi Bragin (University of Washington Bothell)
Moncell Durden (University of Southern California)
Rosemarie Roberts (Connecticut College)
Ana Rokafella Garcia-Dionisio (Full Circle Productions)
H. Samy Alim (University of California, Los Angeles)

Friday, February 24th, 2023
1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. PST

Free and open to the public.

Register in advance to attend the Zoom meeting

Download the poster here.  

Feel free to contact Professor Anthea Kraut at anthea.kraut@ucr.edu 
with any questions about the event.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society’s 
Blackness Unbound and Performing Difference Working Groups, Faculty Commons Project

IMANI KAI JOHNSON (She/Her/Hers)
Associate Professor

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar, specializing in the African diaspora, global popular culture, and Hip Hop. She was born and raised in Northern California, but comes to UC Riverside from her adopted home in Brooklyn New York. She has attended UC Berkeley (BA), New York University (MA), and the University of Southern California (Ph.D.) where she received her doctorate in American Studies & Ethnicity. Dr. Johnson’s work explores African diasporic ritual cultures, popular cultures, representations of race, and negotiations of racial, gender, and national differences.

Dr. Johnson’s book on the ritual circle in international Hip Hop dance communities is titled Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (Oxford University Press, 2022). This work examines the political, cultural, and spiritual nature of Hip Hop dance through a close examination of the ritual practice of cyphering—collaborative and competitive dance circles. Using the metaphor of “dark matter” (a physics concept about non-luminous matter comprising the majority of the universe), the book addresses histories of exclusion, marginalization, and invisibilization that fundamentally shape the aesthetic sensibilities of breaking culture, and the ways that such aesthetics inform the current circulation of Hip Hop dance transnationally. She has published articles in Alif, Women & Performance, and the Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop.