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Oneka LaBennett

Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Oneka LaBennett
Email oneka.labennett@usc.edu

Research & Practice Areas

Youth culture and Black girlhood; race, gender, and popular culture; urban anthropology; migration and the African Diaspora; the global Caribbean.

Biography

Oneka LaBennett is Director of USC’s Black Studies Initiative/Emerging Center, and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender and Sexuality Studies. LaBennett is the author of Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (NYU Press 2024), which was shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press 2011), and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (UC Press 2012).

Her most recent book,...

Education

  • Ph.D. Social Anthropology, Harvard University, 2002

  • Research Specialties

    Youth culture and Black girlhood; race, gender, and popular culture; urban anthropology; migration and the African Diaspora; the global Caribbean.

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