Black to the Future: Traces of Afrodiasporic hybridity and anti-anti-essentialism in Sun Ra’s It’s After the End of the World

On the 18-minute track Myth Versus Reality (The Myth-Science Approach), composer Sun Ra takes us on a kaleidoscopic musical voyage, commencing with a manifesto-like chant: “If you are not a reality, whose myth are you? If you are not a myth, whose reality are you?”. Sun Ra’s answer to this question is delivered sonically: as the recitation of the antimetabole subsides into the background, a cacophonic crash of jazz instruments and patternless noise takes over. As Sun Ra intended, its stylistic discordance echoes a greater narrative of the post-slave Black diasporic condition- a field of study centred on questions of hybridity, oppositionality, and the conflict of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’. 

With its transdiscursive nature, this relationship embodies the critical practice of Afrofuturism, of which Sun Ra served as a pioneer. Coined by Mark Dery in 1993, the aesthetic mode and philosophy projects black speculative futures derived from Afrodiasporic culture and its intersection with technology. In forging futures wherein technological advancement is synonymous with blackness, Afrofuturism critiques the monolithic view of linear progress as spearheaded by white men, progress that carries forward into a similarly white future. However, the danger with the Afrofuturist practice, argued by J. Griffith Rollefson, is a potential reification of black inferiority in its juxtaposition with ‘white’ technologies, given Afrofuturism’s very premise of the normalized disparity between blackness and a whitewashed cybernetic future (2008, p. 85). Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s anti-anti-essentialism, Rollefson introduces a theoretical framework, which, in Afrofuturist terms, involves the collapsing of loaded signifiers of whiteness and blackness, e.g. the sleek robot and Afro-Caribbean voodoo respectively, into one. With a focus on Rollefson’s framework, this essay employs various schools of thought to examine the means by which Afrofuturist music, particularly the American composer Sun Ra, conflates what the Afrodiasporic condition retains of the past- of enslavement, displacement and continued inequality- with the imagery of a whitewashed future to ultimately undermine linear Western universalism and white supremacy. The aesthetic and linguistic methodologies of Sun Ra’s 1970 album, It’s After the End of the World, serve as the primary case study in this analysis, with the aim of determining the extent to which they problematize the rigid binary of blackness versus whiteness, and in turn, that of essentialism versus anti-essentialism.

In his autoethnographic work The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois introduces the term ‘double consciousness’, foregrounding racialization in his analysis of the racialized subject’s self-formation (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2015, p. 231). The racialized subject here refers particularly to the African-American, whose identity is characterised by a dialectical conflict that produces an inward ‘twoness’ (Pittman, 2016), as Du Bois elucidates in his first chapter: “the Negro is... born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (1903, p. 22). Referencing the psycho-social divisions in “post-slavery” America, the Du Boisian conception ascribes a particular life-experience to African-Americans, not as an essential predisposition but rather with regard to socio-political circumstances of the time- in the south, Jim Crow laws, and in the north, de facto segregation, as well as the overarching racist threat across the continent. This tangible reality, in conjunction with the demands of white fantasies inscribed onto the racialized subject, produces for a “sensation” that falls short of a true self-consciousness, characterised by its persistent competition between two disparate ideals. 

Employing Du Bois’s “double consciousness”, Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic introduces the Atlantic slave trade as the foundation for the Black diasporic condition as possessing an “explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (1993, p. 15). Eschewing the absolutist approach to nationality as homogeneous, nation-state based, Gilroy favours analysing the Atlantic as a singular, complex unit that produces said internal struggle between two seemingly irreconcilable identities. In rejecting ethnic absolutism, however, Gilroy also argues against the mutual exclusivity of these two dialectical subjectivities, proposing the occupation of the space between them as an “oppositional act of political subordination” (1993, p. 1)- that is, in paradoxically thinking of the duality as one, or demonstrating the continuity between the two, the racialized identity yields power in becoming a unique hybridity as opposed to a division. 

This act of conflating two dialectical opposites, in the context of the Afrofuturist practice, will serve as the foundation for analysis in the examination of the transdisciplinary works of Sun Ra. Theorized by J. Griffith Rollefson, this analysis will draw upon the “Robot Voodoo Power” thesis, which explores Gilroy’s anti-anti-essentialism within the aesthetic and linguistic methodologies of Afrofuturism. Rollefson argues that whilst Gilroy does not comment directly on Afrofuturism, his engagement with the ways in which technologies inform discourses of black ‘soul’ anticipated the field of inquiry (2008, p. 91), particularly in his foregrounding of music as an opportunity to “break the deadlock between the two unsatisfactory positions that have dominated recent discussion of black cultural politics” (Gilroy, 1991, p. 124). Furthermore, in his chapter on black music in The Black Atlantic, Gilroy underscores the significance of slaves’ limited access to literacy, which was “often denied on pain of death” (1993, p. 74), to the critical power of black music. The expressive power of music, Gilroy posits, has grown in inverse proportion to that of language, as music served as one of the few opportunities offered as a surrogate for the other forms of individual autonomy denied by life on the plantations (1993, p. 74).

Following this line of thought, Rollefson proposes that Afrofuturism’s criticality derives from its dismantling of the binary between essentialist and anti-essentialist positions. Moving beyond double consciousness, Afrofuturism’s creative amalgamation of racial tropes instead stresses hybridity as a form of critique. While the moniker “Afrofuturism” and its study are relatively new, articulations of Afrofuturism can be traced back to the 1950s, the musical approach first propounded by Sun Ra. As an intellectual aesthetic movement, Afrofuturism examines the intersections of race, science and technology, envisaging a black posthumanism “not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity” (Weheliye, 2005, p. 297). In inscribing onto their bodies alternative identities- interplanetary alter egos, supersonic second selves- Afrofuturists renounce the idea of a universal humanity central to Western Enlightenment thought, a humanity denied of African-Americans for so long it is “no longer a dream deferred but a dream discarded” (Rollefson, 2008, p. 89). Recognising the constructed nature of both the myth of the subhuman and the myth of the superhuman, Afrofuturism harnesses its critical power by referencing, appropriating and ultimately rejecting the primitive fantasies ascribed to black bodies, instead asserting a new, otherworldly subjecthood. At the same time, these alternative identities combat a whitewashed vision of the future wherein blackness is always constructed as oppositional to technology-driven progress. What Rollefson contends in his thesis is that Afrofuturism’s critical commentary can rapidly turn into a reification of black inferiority- that is, when juxtaposed blatantly with white progress, albeit constructed, the falsehoods of black primitivism and backwardness may be reinforced (2008, p. 85). He therefore asserts the significance of eschewing both the essentialist black nativist stance and the anti-essentialism of white poststructuralist identities in the Afrofuturist practice. In aesthetic terms, this may be exemplified through a playful inversion and interweaving of racial tropes rife in 19th century music, such as capitalising on fantasies of black voodoo and magic- a supposed retention of the ‘dark continent’- and ironically juxtaposing them with science fiction as a form of ‘white magic’ (Rollefson, 2008, p. 91). And even in instances of black cultural production wherein blatant notions of ‘essence’ (of the African-American psyche) are asserted, Emmanuel Parent explains, an ontology “which furnishes the basis for a deconstruction of this latent essentialism” is paradoxically but nonetheless produced (2012, p. 482).

This approach to Afrofuturism is nowhere more evident than in the otherworldly words and sounds of Sun Ra’s multidisciplinary oeuvre. Born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra self-identified rather as a descendant of Saturn, transcending earth-bound racial classifications. Laying claim to Saturnine provenance would earn Ra the status of an eccentric, with obituaries after Ra’s death describing him as a “nutter” and “galactic gobbledegook” (Lock, 1999, p. 13). However, Graham Lock posits that Sun Ra never contended his Saturnine origins in a concrete sense, rather, this mythic persona belonging to the “Angel race” sought to metaphorically “initiate a discourse on Otherness” (1999, p. 62). Whilst it inevitably drew from the Afrodiasporic condition of oppositional double consciousness, this position of the Other occupied by Sun Ra was always situated outside the realm of racial essentialist thought. The otherworldly persona cultivated through the revitalization of mysticism, science and ancient mythology was never to be mired in earthliness, as Ra himself, in his own words, “never wanted to be a part of planet Earth” (qtd in Litweiler, 1990, p. 144). Such tendencies to reify notions of race are palpable throughout readings of Sun Ra’s oeuvre. Writer Amiri Baraka, despite having eschewed his Black nationalist views of jazz music since the ‘70s, depicts Sun Ra as possessing “the true self-consciousness of the Afro-American intellectual artist revolutionary”, who “knew our historic ideology and sociopolitical consciousness was our freedom” (qtd in Youngquist, 2010, p. 155). Again, this view seems to reduce Sun Ra to an extension of social circumstances, and as Nathaniel Mason contends, “locates his ideology as yearning backwards to crystallize his own identity for the future, creating a stasis of African-American identity” (2015, p. 10). Counter to this straightforward equation of “historic ideology” with liberation, Rollefson’s thesis assumes a more intricate approach which takes into account aesthetic considerations and their ideological loadedness. Central to Rollefson’s thesis is Alondra Nelson’s explication that “a race-free future smacks of a white (male) future”, renouncing the humanist stance of individual agency as the foundation for self-formation (Davies, 1991, p. 42), in that the Western notion of a universal humanity inevitably foregrounds whiteness as intrinsic to human progress and thus its future. 

The track Myth vs. Reality (The Myth-Science Approach) on Sun Ra’s 1970 live album, It’s After the End of the World, serves as a pertinent example of Rollefson’s thesis. On the 18-minute musical voyage, Sun Ra takes his audience through a sonically erratic, ear-piercing cacophony of declarative spoken word which abruptly explodes into the multiphonic sounds of jazz instruments. The hybridity of the sounds themselves conjures up a liberated vision, in which fact and fiction- those of the past and the future- are consolidated, paralleling Gilroy’s advocacy of occupying the space between the two dialectical halves of one’s identity. Moreover, by positioning “reality” and “science” as oppositional to the counterpart of “myth”, the title itself serves as an implicit questioning of rationality and the groundedness of reality (Rollefson, 2008, p. 92). It is evident here that Sun Ra eschews the totalising chronicles of history, in favour of an infinitely more complex understanding of the world “not a part of history” but “more part of mystery” (qtd in Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, 1980). Sun Ra’s episteme relinquishes earth-bound classifications, but this is not to suggest that it is entirely grounded in magic either; in the documentary, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Sun Ra elucidates the dialectic framework from which his ideology arises whilst sat in front the White House: “You can’t have anything without a comparison. I’m sitting in front of the White House looking across the street and I don’t see the black house. See, you can’t have anything without its parallel and its opposite” (1980). With this candid metaphor, it becomes apparent that Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist practice is not confined to the realm of magic, as myth ceases to exist without its opposite- reality. In the second section of Myth vs. Reality (The Myth-Science Approach), ingeniously entitled Angelic Proclamation, saxophonist Danny Davis cordially declares: “We want to tell you about my home planet, Saturn.” This politely delivered expression of his Saturnine roots is followed by a raucous clash of percussive sounds, which then suddenly subsides, and Davis continues: “You think you are human...I came to tell you: you are citizens of the greater universe.” Here, Sun Ra and his Arkestra offer to their audience a reimagined subjectivity, a subjectivity which “disarticulates Africa from the totalising narratives of oppression that threaten to represent blackness as a burden alone” (Rollefson, 2008, p. 94). 

Just as Sun Ra’s music projects this anti-anti-essentialist ethos, his futuristic stage persona- which drew upon mythologized visions of Judeo-Egyptian aesthetics- demonstrates transnationalism. The antiquity of Egyptian civilization, Paul Youngquist posits, offered for black radicalism an alternative to the monolithic notion of an enlightened West, the same West responsible for “chattel slavery, racism, Jim Crow and segregation” (2016, p. 43). With his Egyptian headdresses, colourful dashikis and futuristic space helmets, Sun Ra fashioned a visual identity that would look to the past- not solely of Africa, but also Ancient Egypt’s Pharaonic era- as well as the future, one purged of the equally mythical structures upholding narratives of ostensible American pluralism. 

Figure 1: It's After the End of the World album artwork

Similarly tactful is the choice of album artwork for It’s After The End of the World [Fig. 1], which depicts a segment from the center panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. On one hand, this choice is loaded with playful paradoxes: Sun Ra, blatantly renouncing all ties to Earth, chooses to feature one of the most notable portrayals of worldly pleasures as his cover art. However, a closer examination would suggest that this selection is perhaps entirely attuned to Sun Ra’s ideology. While Bosch’s triptych features earthly pleasures, in the view of art historian Wilhelm Fraegner, it is precisely their transience that produces the allegory central to the work’s messaging. He argues for the moral reading of the central panel as a playground of corruption, which represents “a utopia, a garden of divine delight before the Fall” (1951, p. 10-11). From this perspective, Sun Ra’s practice- collapsing earth-bound classifications to generate speculative futures- falls in line with Bosch’s work, which foresees the catastrophic future that will emerge from humankind’s indulgence in lust and gluttony. In the context of the larger Afrofuturist project, the visual dimension of Sun Ra, by consolidating multiple, nonsequential timelines, exercises a critical power that radically undermines the linearity and short-sightedness of whitewashed notions of progress.

Considering the limitations of rhetoric, it comes as no surprise that the critical power of Black cultural forms frequently derives from the arts, as aesthetic production possesses an embodied expressive power. With its expansive timelines and racially-coded signifiers, Afrofuturism epitomizes the way in which the relationship between socio-political conditions and Black cultural production, albeit complex and manifold, produces acute critiques of a continued inequality in the US and abroad. Particular emphasis is placed on the complex and manifold nature of Black cultural forms here, not solely in its production but also in its reception. Just as the Civil Rights Movement started to gain traction in the 1950s, Sun Ra would decide to eschew all ties to humanity and instead lay claim to extraterrestrial origin. Whether this makes Sun Ra a liberator or an escapist traitor is a question that succinctly illustrates the impossibility of prescribing a methodology to the yielding of ‘critical power’. That said, without denying the diversity of radical expression, this essay underscores the anti-anti-essentialist approach as an apposite strategy for Black cultural practices to harness critical efficacy, by serving as neither an essential, residual effect of Black history, nor a free-floating and purely aesthetic endeavor. 

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