Book Trailer - A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism ...

Published by the University of Texas Press, "A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism offers a spirited introduction to the life and work of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra’s wide-ranging creative output—music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry—and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music.

By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world."

Afrofuturism Lectures at Missouri History Museum, February 2 and 23

Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, Harris-Stowe State University, delivers this in-depth, two-session look at Afrofuturism, which addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through a technoculture and science-fiction lens.

When:	Sundays, Feb. 2, 23 • 3pm to 5pm
Where:	AT&T Foundation Multipurpose Room
How Much:	Free

Janelle Monae's The Archandroid Makes Another Top 10 List

From the Music Room's "Top 10 Albums of the Year":

#5 The Archandroid: Janelle Monae

Janelle Monae’s ambitious debut album The Archandroid is a thing of true beauty, part rap, part folk, part rock, part disco, an epic record full of ambition and with 18 tracks and at 70 minutes long, it’s nothing short of a journey. Like all great concept albums The Archandroid follows a series of ideas, in this case Monae explores elements of science fiction and Afrofuturism. Doubtless to listening to any song as a standalone track is almost criminal, this is an album to be experienced in one sitting.

Research Note: Sun Ra & Afrofuturism

"[Sun] Ra's interest in science fiction was also linked to his belief that African Americans, because they had been virtually written out of history, should be prepared to write themselves into the future. He thus stressed the importance of becoming proficient in a range of new technologies so that African Americans could play a part in engineering their own futures, rather than letting whites construct them."

Jamie Sexton, "A Cult Film By Proxy: Space is the Place and the Sun Ra Mythos", New Review of Film & Television Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2006, page 200.

Research Note: Afrofuturism

"S. Craig Watkin's Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema and Kodo Eshun's More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction expand both the parameters of Hip Hop and the discourses about and around it, albeit in radically different ways. The cultural heft of Hip Hop informs Watkins's exploration of the rise of African American independent and mainstream cinema in the late eighties and early nineties, and Eshun concentrates on particular musical provenances of Hip Hop in order to interface the genre with other post-WWII black musical practices, including Jazz, Techno, and Jungle, to construct a narrative about a hidden history of black sonic musical experimentation and science fiction. Where Watkins grounds Hip Hop and black cinema squarely in social reality, Eshun does his best to escape the social altogether, focusing instead on the music and the ephemera surrounding it, such as album covers and marginalia etched into the grooves of vinyl. Consequently, their writing styles could not be more different: Watkins constructs his arguments in fairly tradition sociological terms, while Eshun's musings are marked by hyperbole, digressions, and, at times, seemingly stream-of-consciousness vocalizations. Watkins represents 'Afro-realism' where Eshun envisions 'Afrofuturism.'"

Alexander Weheliye. "Keepin' It (Un) Real: Perusing the Boundaries of Hip Hop Culture," CR: The New Centennial Review - Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2001, pp. 292-293.

Research Note: Italian Futurism

"The Futurist Manifesto first appeared in Le Figaro for 20 February 1909. Its author was an Italian, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who, though making his mark first of all in Paris, had also been active in Milan since 1905 as editor of Poesia, one of the aims of which was the publicizing of the works of the French Symbolists in Italy. (Later, Marinetti was also to claim Zola, Whitman, George Kahn and Veraeren among his predecessors -- in an article characteristically entitled 'We deny our Symbolist Masters, the last Moon-Lovers.') In this, the first of his many Manifestos, Marinetti declared: 'It is from Italy that we broadcast this manifesto of ours to the whole world... because we want to free this country from the stinking gangrene of its professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antique dealers.' Italy had been a junk shop for too long, he insisted; now it was time to burn her libraries, flood her museums and galleries, and tear down her sacred cities."

Judy Ransom. "Italian Futurism," Modernism 1890 - 1930, Pelican guides to European literature,. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976.

Research Note: Afrofuturism

Taking in contemporary music and sf, [Mark] Sinker positions hip-hop in “the grand syncretic tradition of bebop, not ashamed to acknowledge that technological means and initial building material are always simply what falls to hand: but that meaning is nonetheless a matter of energetic and visionary redeployment, not who first owned or made this or that fragment” (“Loving the Alien”). Although cyberpunk has typically been discussed in terms of European avant-garde detournement or Burroughsian cut-up, its parallels and affinities with bebop and hip-hop have generally gone unacknowledged. Sinker does more than merely point to this omission, however. Just as Thomas Foster argues that cyberpunk “didn’t so much die as experience a sea change into a more generalized cultural formation,” so Sinker suggests that the black, urban, proletarian experience central to the development of these musical forms speaks directly to the experience of the global underclass created by the intertwined logics of capital, Empire, and race: more-or-less concomitant with the growth of hip-hop, cyberpunk, the “radical leading edge” of “white SF,” was “arguing that the planet, already turned Black, must embrace rather than resist this [relationship to technology]: that. . . only ways of technological interaction inherited from the jazz and now the rap avant-garde can reintegrate humanity with the runaway machine age.”

Mark Bould. "The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF."