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

Imani Kai Johnson · Oxford University Press · 2023 · Originally in English · scholarly

How the cypher became breaking's most powerful organizing form, traced from African ritual to global hip-hop.

About the author

The author is a scholar and practitioner with two decades of active participation in breaking culture as a judge, MC, and dancer. This embedded position distinguishes the work from external academic analysis; the author writes from inside the communities and events they study, lending ethnographic credibility and cultural authority often absent from dance scholarship.

Documents these traditions

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