Professor Reiland Rabaka
Professor • Director, Center for African and African American Studies
Africana Studies • Critical Race Class Gender and Sexuality Studies

Office Location: Ketchum 257

Pronouns: he / him / his

 

Education

Ph.D., Temple University
M.A., Temple University 
B.F.A., University of the Arts

Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for African American Studies (CAAS), College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), University of Houston

Research Interests

African and African American history, African and African American politics, African and African American social movements, Black feminist theory, Black sexuality studies, Black popular culture, Black popular music, critical race theory, and decolonial theory


Reiland Rabaka is Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Founder and 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). Professor Rabaka has published 17 books and more than 100 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays. His books include Africana Critical TheoryAgainst Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of SociologyForms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of DecolonizationConcepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical TheoryThe Negritude MovementThe Routledge Handbook of Pan-AfricanismDu Bois: A Critical Introduction; Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights MovementBlack Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement; Hip Hop’s InheritanceHip Hop’s Amnesia; and The Hip Hop Movement. Academic journals Rabaka has published in include Journal of Black StudiesJournal of African American StudiesJournal of Africana StudiesAfricana Studies Annual ReviewAfricalogical Perspectives, Africana MethodologyEthnic Studies Review, Journal of Classical Sociology, The PhilosopherJouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial StudiesRaisons politiques: Revue de théorie politiqueContemporanea, 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. Professor Rabaka has conducted archival research and lectured extensively both nationally and internationally, and he has been the recipient of several community service citations, distinguished teaching awards, and research fellowships. His cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis has been featured in print, radio, television, and online media venues such as NPR, PBS, BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV, BET, VH1, The GuardianAl Jazeera, and USA Today, among others. He is also a poet and musician. 


Selected Publications

Books

Reiland Rabaka, Black Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement (London: Routledge, 2022).

Reiland Rabaka, Du Bois: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).

Reiland Rabaka, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism (London: Routledge, 2020).

Reiland Rabaka, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2017).

Reiland Rabaka, Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

Reiland Rabaka, The Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

Reiland Rabaka, Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Reiland Rabaka, The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).

Arturo Aldama, Elisa Facio, Daryl Maeda, and Reiland Rabaka, eds. Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011).

Reiland Rabaka, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: The International Library of Essays in Classical Sociology (London: Ashgate, 2010).

Reiland Rabaka, Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

Reiland Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

Reiland Rabaka, Du Bois’s Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

Reiland Rabaka, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century: An Essay on Africana Critical Theory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).