SUN RA'S CHICAGO: AFROFUTURISM AND THE C

SUN RA'S CHICAGO: AFROFUTURISM AND THE C

ISBN 10: 022673210X / ISBN 13: 9780226732107

Editore: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Codice articolo NWUS9780226732107

Riassunto:

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.

Informazioni sull?autore: William Sites is associate professor in Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago.

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Titolo: SUN RA'S CHICAGO: AFROFUTURISM AND THE C
Casa editrice: University of Chicago Press
Data di pubblicazione: 2020
Legatura: Brossura
Condizione: NEW