The Other Side of Time: Sun Ra’s Sonic Media Cosmology

Keywords: Afrofuturism, Space, Media Geology, Music, Sound, Technology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

The 1974 film Space Is the Place begins with surreal, disorienting imagery—even further disorienting for how familiar its forested background seems. Sun Ra, describing how others might reach this alien planet and its new society for black folks, says “We’ll bring them here through either isotope teleportation, transmolecularization, or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music” (Space is the Place).

I explore in this paper what it means to take seriously Sun Ra’s conviction in Space Is the Place that his music literally, not figuratively, serves as a vehicle for Afro-American people to reach another planet, beyond white, capitalist domination. What would it mean to think of Sun Ra’s space jazz as a kind of weird infrastructure—a vehicle made of articulated time that might carry one past white Man’s perennial obsession with groundedness?

I ponder this question through examining the sonic experience of the Sun Ra song “Space is the Place” from the album of the same name. Understanding that Blackness serves as the negative ontological foundation of Western modernity, I travel from this sonic experience into the question of the music’s materiality, through and beyond the mediation of historical and geological temporality, into what Sun Ra calls the bottomless pit below this “inside-out planet… / outside-in planet” that is white Man’s Earth (This Planet Is Doomed 18). I conclude by reappraising the fraught present of humanist expansion in budding post-planetary times.