Oneka LaBennett

Associate Professor of Africana Studies

Oneka LaBennett received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2002, and her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Wesleyan University in 1994. Her research and teaching interests include popular youth culture; race, gender, and consumption; urban anthropology; transnationalism and diaspora; and Caribbean migration. LaBennett is the author of She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2011), and editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2012; co-edited with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Laura Pulido). She has contributed to a number of journals and edited volumes, including most recently an essay titled "Racialization," in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (second edition, forthcoming, NYU Press). She has also conducted oral history research on art and culture in the Bronx with a focus on Bronx women's contributions to hip-hop music. LaBennett was born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, New York.