Sun Ra: Intentional Otherness and the Search for a Place

Paulo Barata, a student of English and American Studies living in Lisbon posted the following at Vimeo.  Thanks to Charles Blass for posting the link at the Saturn list.

This is a video I put together with footage from John Coney's film "Space is the Place", as a visual aid to a paper I presented at the International Symposium Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging in American and British Contexts, titled "Sun Ra: Intentional Otherness and the Search for a Place".

Abstract:

Sun Ra was, first and foremost, a man deeply concerned with the advancement of mankind. He was also a musician, poet and philosopher. For Ra identity is not negotiated but self-proclaimed: his persona was carefully constructed to spark self-awareness and creativity in others. From the rejection of his slave name to his Afrocentric readings of scripture, explorations of Egyptian myth and heavy recourse to space age imagery and terminology, Ra consistently presented himself as the Other so that we may reflect upon the nature of Self and introduce positive change in our lives and the world. His body of work stresses an alternative past and future for humanity, attainable through the cultivation of a disciplined inner space and the physical movement to outer space, and illustrates an anger towards the white erasure of black history that places him firmly within the bounds of African-American grassroots intelligentsia. Ra mined much of the same territory as his peers yet he synthesized his findings in radical ways, uniquely combining

historical revisionism with utopian prophecy. Are you ready to alter your destiny?

"Now and then tiring of what they call reality

Bruised and beaten by its force

I step into the friendly city of the forest

Of what they call illusion

There to tend my wounds and heal them

With the lightnin’ touch of balanced thought

And the splendid comradeship of other worlds"

— Sun Ra, “Other Thoughts”, in The Immeasurable Equation.