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Paper short abstract:

Sun Ra and his Arkestra explored outerspace through music as a literal means of space travel. As most their international concerts were taking place in Europe, the rare visits on the African continent become even more meaningful when approaching an understanding of Sun Ra’s relations to Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Sun Ra’s defining era in the late 50s and 60s, with the founding of the independent label Saturn Records and its subsequent numerous releases under the varying names of the Sun Ra’s Arkestra, is closely tied to the era of the space race. In 1962, John F. Kennedy extended his new frontier onto space in his “Moon Speech” as yet another final frontier. Sun Ra’s outerspace explorations were already taking off in 1954, when he founded his rehearsal band as a means to explore the infinite cosmos through music as a means of space travel. While taking his name from Egyptian mythology, and having a deep engagement with African music traditions and African references in song titles such as “Ancient Ethiopia” (first released in 1959), Sun Ra did not understand himself to be African-American, neither African, nor belonging to the category of human altogether, but to the angel race hailing from Saturn. Sun Ra and the Arkestra visited Egypt for the first time in 1971. They participated in the third Pan-African festival FESTAC ’77 as part of the American section, which brought figures such as Louis Farrakhan and Audre Lorde on the same airplane together to Lagos, Nigeria. Focusing on these rare visits to Africa offers insights into one of Afrofuturism’s pioneering figures’ relation to Africa and in that sense grapple with what might be termed the African question of said concept.