Reiland Rabaka

  • Faculty Affiliate
  • Professor of African, African American + Caribbean Studies
  • Founder/Director, Center for African + African American Studies
  • MUSICOLOGY
Reiland Rabaka

Reiland Rabaka is Professor of African, African American and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Founder/Director of the Center for African & African American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Rabaka has published 19 books and more than 100 scholarly articles, book chapters and essays. His books include Africana Critical Theory; Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology; Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization; Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and the Africana Tradition of Critical Theory; The Negritude Movement; The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism; and Du Bois: A Critical Introduction. 

A wing of his work has made significant contributions to African American musicology and his books in this area include Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement; Black Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement; Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas; The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics; Hip Hop’s Inheritance; Hip Hop’s Amnesia; and The Hip Hop Movement. 

Academic journals Rabaka has published in include Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, International Journal of Africana Studies, Africana Studies Annual Review, Africalogical Perspectives, Ethnic Studies Review, Journal of Classical Sociology, History of Humanities, The Philosopher, Raisons politiques: Revue de théorie politique and Revista da Associação Brasileira de Pesquisadores/as Negros/as (ABPN), among others. 

He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Eugene M. Kayden Book Award, the Cheikh Anta Diop Book Award and the National Council for Black Studies’ Distinguished Career Award. MORE