A musician from Alabama who visited Saturn by accident in the late 1930s, Sun Ra and his Arkestra took music to a higher plane through free jazz. But Sun Ra was not only a key figure in the development of Afrofuturism because of his music. He was also a thinker and, thanks to the magic of the 1970s, a lecturer as well.

That’s right. In 1971 Sun Ra taught African-American Studies 198 — aka Sun Ra 171 — at UC Berkeley. It was a time of tremendous strain for race relations in the US. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had solved a lot of things but hardly everything. In the late 1960s the situation intensified, especially in California, where the Watts riots (or Watts rebellion), Caesar Chavez’s campaigns on behalf of farmworkers, and the Black Panther Party all happened within a few years of each other. The first ethnic studies department in US was founded at San Francisco State University, just across the bay from Berkeley.

It would take a few more years for the turmoil that roiled in anthropology to find its way in to print, but the point is that this period brought about a tremendous broadening of the academic imagination and opportunity for score of new voices, ideas, and approaches. Sun Ra’s course, which was part of his time as an artist-in-residence, was the result of these broader shifts.

And, best of all, it’s preserved on the Internetz! You can find the reading list and listen to a lecture at Open Culture and several other outlets in the web. It gets reblogged every three or four years and so I figured… now was the time to reblog it.

As much as I’d like to, it’s hard to describe Sun Ra as an anthropologist, using even the most capacious definition of the term. I’ll admit that. And yet… and yet… Hmmm. The reading list mixed theosophy and late-Victorian occultism with renderings on jazz, and the lecture includes references to thinkers like James Baldwin. There’s something about the juxtaposition, imagination, and experimentation that seems deeply anthropological to me. Perhaps if Sun Ra was not an anthropologist, we anthropologists should aspire to be Sun Ra — or at least take our own trip to the wayoutosphere.

I hope that Black Panther creates a moment in which some new people get turned on to people like Sun Ra or Octavia Butler (if you think Ursula K. Leguin uses science fiction to explore humanity, try Butler’s Dawn!). So yes: If you like the Black Panther movie, go read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s A Nation Under Our Feet. But if you want to go higher, look to Sun Ra — and see him not just as a musician, but as an intellectual.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book “Leviathans at the Gold Mine” won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book award. He is interested in political anthropology, the anthropology of virtual worlds, the history of anthropology, and public anthropology and open access scholarship.

alex.golub.name/

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