Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City

Sun Ra was a prolific and eccentric musician who lived in Chicago's South Side from 1946 to 1961. He drew from a wide range of intellectual and musical sources to create a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism, and Sun Ra's Chicago contends that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 20 October 2020
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

One of the most prolific and eccentric figures in the history of music is Sun Ra (1914-93). Renowned for his extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra's Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth -- specifically to the city's South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and launched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism, where Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold dream-book bibles, and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads, where styles circulated and mashed together in clubs and community dancehalls. Sun Ra drew from a vast array of locally available intellectual and musical sources -- from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, rhythm and blues, Latin dance music, and the latest pop exotica -- to put together a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra's Chicago contends that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city -- and that by excavating postwar black experience from inside Sun Ra's South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.

Weight: 480g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226732107