Halifu Osumare is respected for her work as both professional dancer and trailblazing academic, in Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy, Osumare shares experiences from her second career, showing the potential of scholarship to reveal and document underrecognized stories of Black dance and global pop culture. In this memoir, Osumare dances across several fields of study while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-present that is transforming into the Afrofuture.

Osumare 2018 publication of her first memoir Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir (University Press of Florida) won the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, the Before Columbus American Book Award, and Osumare was awarded the Dance Studies Association 2020 Distinction in Dance Award for lifetime achievement in performance, scholarship and service to dance.

Much like her mentor before her, Katherine Dunham, in Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy, the reader sees clearly the varied ways in which Osumare has dedicated her life to the intersections of the arts and humanities for the crafting and building of a better world, the building of the AfroFuture.