Awards:

Finalist for the 2004 Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association for the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year:

“Chernoff's book is powerful, poetic, dramatic and full of images of sorrow, pain, joy, pleasure and laughter.  It admirably and accurately documents the emotions, struggles and dreams of a postcolonial African generation.  Hawa's views, interpretation and/or bodily reactions to her condition redefine the meaning of youth and how contemporary African societies are struggling to (re)construct childhood, parenthood and public authorities.  Hustling is a powerful intervention in African studies in the very fact that Chernoff makes audible the voice of the narrator, proposing sometimes-admirable monologues and other times engaging in a dialogue with Hawa or opening the conversation to other voices.  Hawa's voice as the embodiment of Africa's contemporary condition is reminiscent of Ousmane Sembene's character Penda, a prostitute in God's Bits of Wood.  This book is also one of the more challenging, provocative and very successful attempts to reinvent a new ethnographic and anthropological language, which reconciles the aesthetic and poetic [style] of a narrative and the search for intelligible [interpretative discussion as a] proper characteristic of social sciences.  A great tour de force.”

Winner of the 2004 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology:

“John Chernoff earned his Ph.D. in social science and religion at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1974 and is an independent scholar living in Pittsburgh.  Hustling Is Not Stealing is his second groundbreaking book. In 1979, he published African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms, based on a decade studying music in social life in Ghana and training to achieve performance proficiency in several African musical idioms. The research for Hustling Is Not Stealing grew out of his interest in young people whose musical tastes he followed in urban nightclubs. In the stories of Hawa, an African bar girl who moves between city and village, we are captivated by the experience of culture as a personal challenge, by ‘a radically alternative approach to life and living.’”

Best reader letter:

Good afternoon Mister Chernoff.  My name is [ . . . ] and I just finished reading your two Africa bar girl books.  To say they are phenomenal and I am highly impressed would be a massive understatement.  If you did not receive every literary award available in the years they were published, a grievous and tremendous injustice occurred.

During the nineteen eighties I spent a lot of time in Asia and am familiar with the bar girl scene in Thailand and several other countries, but even without that background I would still consider the books extraordinary.

Regarding the academics, I am sure they are quite envious.  Not in two hundred million years could the typical American scholar amass the wealth of information you did.  In fact I suspect even you do not realize how monumental your works are.