Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City
by William Sites
Softcover
2020
Illustrated
328 pages
NEW Copy
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Sun Ra (1914–93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures
in the history of music. Renowned for 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 relaunched
his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural
activism: 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 the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array
of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity,
and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct
a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African
Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged
from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar
black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities
of urban life in new ways.