Historical Studies of Urban America #: Sun Ra's Chicago

Afrofuturism and the City

Historical Studies of Urban America #: Sun Ra's Chicago
William Sites
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Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 328pg
20 Oct 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226732107
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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 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.

Beyond the Usual Beating
Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914-1960
Bulls Markets: Chicago's Basketball Business and the New Inequality
City of Dignity: Christianity, Liberalism, and the Making of Global Los Angeles
Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860
In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930
Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960
Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State
Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling
Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City
To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing
Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, The: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin
Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning

"Like its subject, Sun Ra' s Chicago is a category buster--social history, musicology, urban studies, hermeneutics, cultural reclamation--and as such, a revelation. Sites tells a story of countercultural ferment in 1950s south side Chicago that is detailed and provocative. Sun Ra, Alton Abraham, and the members and friends of the Arkestra were truly a ' creative class' long before that term, as we know it, was coined. " -- "Larry Bennett, author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism" "Sun Ra' s Chicago is a masterful account of the musician' s formative years. Sites deftly applies a wider lens to his biography, analyzing the urban spaces and networks that shaped Sonny Blount' s transformation from an itinerant musician into the otherworldly philosophical leader of the Arkestra. This book is essential reading not only for Sun Ra listeners but for readers interested in the crosscurrents of Black intellectual thought and the utopian possibilities, past and present, of America' s cities. "-- "Erik S. Gellman, author of Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay"
William Sites is associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226732107
Published: 20 Oct 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 328

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