Imani Kai Johnson’s book Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop offers a provocative analysis of the synergism between Africanist aesthetics, embodied cultural practices, and the communal ritual of the breaking cypher. Drawing extensively from the works of Black feminist choreographers Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Halifu Osumare, Johnson uses a diverse range of research methods, including ethnography, oral histories, performance analysis, and archival research. Her approach is immersive and soulful, indicating long-term and deep investments in the formal possibilities of the breaking cypher, as well as a broader appreciation for the undervalued social work of Black cultural forms. The book courageously approaches the question of whether “the adoption of Africanist aesthetics by non-African diasporans” can facilitate alternate models of cross-cultural exchange rather than cultural erasure and appropriation (xiv). In other words, is Black culture for everybody? Can the “global” circulation of Black cultural...
Review: Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop, by Imani Kai Johnson Available to Purchase
Victoria Netanus Xaka is a black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator. She is currently an associate professor of Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. She is also the founder of the recording studio and label GMC Records Rwanda, and has been making music in community with Rwandan artists since 2012. Her academic and creative work center the Black Radical Tradition and black feminist dreamspace. She is deeply invested in the study and practice of fugitive creativity, and her work is devoted to revealing how and where black sociality uses the material affordances of sound to create experiences that evade capture and exploitation by capital accumulation. Victoria is also passionate about using semiotics to demonstrate how shared investments in the sensory experience of blackness bring forth a collective interpreting body that refutes both the possibility of and the desire for the individual human subject.
Victoria Netanus Xaka; Review: Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop, by Imani Kai Johnson. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2025; 37 (2): 136–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2025.37.2.136
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